I thought about this for longer than I’d like to admit because a) circa-2001, I used to�����DZ�����year-end recaps. This was the era of “Best Week Ever” and other clip shows that were rooted in a sense of immediate nostalgia. Year-end shows counting down the “10 Best Celebrity Fights of 2001” or “15 News Stories that Dominated 2003” were effective at manipulating a lot of viewers and readers. It’s not like the “best of” list came into existence in 1999, but with Y2K and 9/11 and G. W. Bush (the last worst president) and an increasing sense of imminent doom . . . there was something appealing about looking back on the last few moments and appreciating��something. ��IT COULD ALL END TOMORROW SO ENJOY YESTERDAY.

B) I’m a hater! We all know that this whole series of posts has been an extended hater’s guide to literary life in 2018, so this isn’t a surprise, but the Buzzfeedification of “lists” really wrecked the sweet nostalgia that existed back in the day. (Only olds say “back in the day.”) When new lists are a daily constant, their general appeal diminishes precipitously. Add to that the idea that a decent number of people are employed to cut up culture into smaller and smaller fragments—”17 Books by Michiganders Now Living in Iowa Who Were Born In the Reagan Era!”—and, well, who cares.

This is all banal and just a reordering of 95% of the shit I’ve already written. But before I create my own ridiculous list (what did you expect? If you’ve read any of these, you know how things work), I want to go straight at the “best of 2018” lists.

These are fun to put together! They’re more fun if your book (as writer, translator, publisher, or designer) are included!

But “Best Of”? Really?

Let’s just throw some serious statistical shade—the final negativity of 2018 before a more loving 2019?—before moving on to the jokey, fun portion of this post.

How many works of fiction were published in 2018? Approximately 50,000 not counting the 500,000+ self-published works of “art.” (So much shade! Just getting it all out . . .) Now, for any one of the “Best Books of 2018” lists—New York Times, Washington Post, Time, The New Yorker—how many books do you think the people passing this “best of” judgement really evaluated?

Let me tell an honest story about how the sausage gets made that is neither flattering, nor anything that I should publicly share. (I suppose this is a test to see a) how controversial this story�����𲹱�������is and b) how many people read more than just the headline.)

Last winter I was one of the judges for the PEN America (aka PEN West? PEN LA? The Hollywood PEN? The one that’s now simply part of PEN?) Translation Prize. There were about 13 titles that us three judges had to review. We used a Google Sheet to share our impressions. Our mandate was to read at least 20-30 pages of each book and then decide if it was a “No Way,” a “maybe,” or a “YES!!!!” for the shortlist.

Here’s the truly unknown part: We were charged with picking a winner by the end of March. Given that Aleksandrs was due to be born around March 1, I sort of, kind of, misread the deadline and implored everyone to pick a winner before the end of��February. Just a month or so after we received our big box of books.

So, OK, I know that this award is not as prestigious as the PEN Central (PEN NYC? PEN World? I should Google this, but we live in a post-fact world, and c’mon, are you really going to fact-check my rambles? SPOILER ALERT: I’m almost always wrong) Translation Award, or the National Book Award for Translation, but I’m 99.9% convinced that the same stressors and personal reactions hold true no matter what you’re judging.

You know what the best Google Sheets entry is in this situation? “Read 20 pages and No Fucking Way.” Not to go all prisoner’s dilemma on the state of award judging, but there’s much more utility in telling everyone they����Dz�’����need to pay attention to a book.

Obviously, this is less than ideal. How many books can you think of that require more than 20 pages to fully appreciate their complexity and depth?����dz���and like, a hundred thousand others?

(Not to digress, but this is the same danger that comes from selecting books to publish based on 20-page samples. I know this is about to become a trope of mine, but isn’t 20 pages of a 300-page book a small sample?)

Let’s get specific and catty (again, it’s the last of the shade, so cut me a bit of slack) but how exactly did��The Perfect Nanny��by Leila Slimani end up on ��and ZERO translation prize longlists?

Yeah, yeah, I ripped on this book back at the beginning of the year, and yes, yes, I know it’s not meant to be an advancement of literary style or a book that anyone will give shits about one hundred years from now—it’s fun! (And filled with murdered children. True Crime is the Crack of 2018.) But when you put it on a “best of” list, when it’s clearly not even one of the ten best���ٰ����Բ������پ��DzԲ���of the past year, you’re signaling something.

And rather than be cynical, I’ll be pragmatic (this is what I call “emotional growth”): as many books as a professional reviewer might receive in a year, I wonder how many they truly�����𲹻�.��Let’s say they read 150 of the 50,000 novels published last year, and read 20 pages of 450 more. Under those circumstances, they’ve summarily dismissed 0.9% of published novels, and read 0.3%. That’s a grand total of 1.2% of the novels published in the past year that the������Ǵڱ�������DzԲ�����book reviewer has evaluated. Even if you dismiss 75% of all published novels as “garbage,” they would have looked at 600 of 12,500 books—4.8%. This is not impressive.

So how��did The Perfect Nanny��end up on these lists? To be pragmatically cynical: Because it was one of the few books the list-makers had read, and one of the only translations.

Of the���ٳ󾱰��ٱ�����books that I judged for the PEN award, I only read five in full. I’m still willing to put 100% of my reputation behind our selection (Chasing the King of Hearts���DZ������Flights), but I also am more than willing to acknowledge that there may well be a gem in the other eight titles that I dismissed because the opening was ass, the cover was uncomfortable on my eyes, or some other minor annoyance at the time that clouded my objectivity.

“Best” is a term that reinforces the patriarchy and the idea of diametrically opposed, either/or terms—”best vs. worst” or “good vs. bad” or “worthwhile vs. not”—and something that our woke moment should be shitting all over. But.

One more thing that always troubles me: Most lists are generative rather than prescriptive. The starting point is “X books/movies/albums/moments of Y” and put the writer into a situation in which they have to research and recall and uncover the appropriate number of items that fit under the (hopefully) SEO-optimized rubric.

For example, in January, I could easily post a list of the “15 Contemporary Spanish Female Authors You Should Read Now.” I have six in mind, could Google the rest. I wouldn’t necessarily have read any of them, but it would be ����solid list.��

Instead, I’ve tried to work backward. Rather than taking a single topic and finding books that can fit that list, I’ve created a “multi-level list of restraints” for myself. Below you’ll find nine books. From nine different presses. Each assigned a different song from 2018. And there are three different Oulipian rules that I’m���Դdz���telling you. Figure them out if you will.

One other note: Inspired by the omnipresent Sam Miller, each of the bits below is as much about������memory of that press/book/translator as anything else. What lasts may not be what’s most important about any of these things, but it’s what lasts that forms one’s lasting opinions.

The main point? This list of the overlooked is about as valuable as a list of the “best books”—flawed, incomplete, subjective—and, hopefully, less self-important (and/or a ), and more of an adventure. Discover something about 2018 books . . . and music?

In case you want to listen along while you read, here’s the Spotify playlist:

���Ǵǰ�:��, whom I met at BEA in Chicago a couple of years ago when Poland was the market focus. I’m mostly Polish (or Kashubian, which, to be honest, is even cooler, at least to me, and mostly because I have a belief that Kashubians are rebellious bomb throwers and this somehow explains why I am this way) and as a result have always had a great interest in Polish literature. Which is partially why Open Letter will be launching a Polish reportage series in 2020. Starting with��, which could easily become our best-selling title ever.

�հ����Բ������ٴǰ�:��Antonia Lloyd-Jones (2 works of fiction published in 2018), who is probably the best translator in the world to drink with. I mean that in the most positive of ways. Antonia is so passionately engaged with literature, with translation, and is so funny.

�ʳܲ�����������:��AmazonCrossing, who, once again, published more works of fiction in translation than any other press, clocking in at 41 for 2018. (To put this in context: Dalkey had 18, Open Letter 6 [doesn’t include poetry or reprints], New Directions 13, and Coffee House 3.) I have a feeling that a number of Three Percent readers dismiss their titles out of hand—and sure, there are a lot of romance books that they bring out—but there are at least a handful of titles every year that are worth checking out.

���DzԲ�:��“Be This Way” by Arms and Sleepers

This song is one of Aleks’s favorite jams. And when a ten-month-old BOUNCES to a song, you know it’s legit. The first time this song came on, he went��crazy. There’s nothing like an infant’s child, and if you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ve probably noticed just how������������������Ի��������ܲ���-����this kid is. I hope he never loses that.

���Ǵǰ�:�� who received the����earlier this year. What’s particularly cool about this award is that it’s given out by the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture and Sports. Could you imagine if the National Endowment for the Arts was in the same governmental grouping as the U.S. Olympic Committee? There are a few different examples of this from around the world, and it makes me wonder if books/culture get more money by being associated with these other ministries, or if it only makes the overall numbers for books and publishing look pathetic. (The best-selling book funded by the NEA sold what? 50,000 copies last year? [Probably a huge exaggeration.] Last night more than 10,000,000 people watched a football game.) For example, the Italian Book Office is part of the Ministry of Trade. Which makes sense, since culture is a sort of export . . . Main point: Give the NEA more money.

Translator(s): Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. It’s like a Translation Dream Team! They would be a tough out in the Translation Olympics . . . Which reminds me: Should we do another Women’s World Cup of Literature this summer? Those were so fun . . .

Publisher: Bellevue, which, man,���վ��԰�����.��I dream of having �����վ��԰�����.��And not just because I love typing “tinkers.” That’s legitimately how you get ahead in nonprofit publishing—win a Pulitzer! (Obviously not available for works not written in English, so, clearly, not going to happen.)

One of the most interesting stories of 2018 that we���徱���’����cover on the Three Percent podcast or here on this “series” is the fact that Bellevue Literary Press broke away from, well, Bellevue, and is not a non-affiliated nonprofit. We need to get Erika Goldman on to break down the pluses and minuses.

���DzԲ�:��“Bodys” by Car Seat Headrest

We’re skinny! . . . . . . . Well. Most of us.

We’re alive! . . . . . . . Well. Most of us.

SO. When I got back from Bread Loaf last summer I weighed more than I ever had in my life. I felt disgusting. I don’t know if it was sympathetic pregnancy weight, too much beer, or the general process of aging, but I didn’t want to end 2018 like that.

So I didn’t. Over the past six months, I’ve lost almost 30 pounds through a combination of intermittent fasting, endless amounts of Pilates, lots of cardio, and will-power.

Nevertheless, according to the BMI chart, I ams still, technically, “overweight.”

Fuck BMI. (I’m allowed one of these per post, apparently.)

But on a more serious note, I listened to��Teens of Denial��every single day I was in Marfa, Texas. At least once, usually twice. It was the most important album in the world to me that summer. The song structures, the vocal games, the “whatever” attitude that was post-Pavement in the most Pavement way. And according to my Spotify Wrapped summary, I listened to Car Seat Headrest for 42 hours in 2018. (My son listened to Panic! At the Disco for 72 hours, which is much more troubling, I think.) If I could see Will Toledo play in person then, like 85% of my bucket list will have been checked off. I AM OLD.

���Ǵǰ�:��Madame Victori����by Catherine Leroux, which I’ve already written about.

�հ����Բ������ٴǰ�:��Lazer��Lederhendler. I don’t know anything about Lazer, but he has seven translations of Quebec authors listed in the Translation Database (which will hopefully be back soon?), which doesn’t include the books that he translated that aren’t available in America. Hopefully I can interview him in February when I do another focus on Quebec literature . . . Based on , I think he would be great to talk to.

One other note about Quebec translators: Just as Quebecois authors don’t get much play in the U.S., the translators are overlooked quite a bit as well. Sheila Fischman (born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which is the most wonderful Canadian place name ever) has translated more than 150 books over her career, and for that reason alone should be a household name about the international literature set. But I don’t feel like that’s the case.

�ʳܲ�����������:�������������Dz�������,��who is one of my favorites (long live Windsor!) and someone I would love to publish a book with. Dan and I have talked about doing something about publishing, which I am planning on working on over the summer. Even before that, I’m going to contribute a piece to a book that Cambridge is publishing and hope to use this as the sort of overture to a longer something.

���DzԲ�:��“Choke Points” by Haiku Salut

Yes and more yes. It is winter and this is the most winter song. And that’s why it’s on here.�� (That and it reminds me of my favorite Múm songs.) Someone asked me the other day about what type of music this is. I have no idea! My love of this song puts my disinterest in popular music in stark relief. I don’t care about Rhianna or the latest Ariana Grande single. (Not that there’s anything wrong with liking either of these—I just don’t.) Granted, my life mantra is “remember the days when,” but, like seriously, being a pop star was not cool when I was in high school. The way hipsters embrace pop music makes me a bit queasy. As if the selective embracing of destructive capitalist tendencies—Amazon = EVIL, Clear Channel Communications = OK because that beat ���dz����—is logically justifiable. I miss punks.

Book:��, who I’m pretty sure sent us a couple of his works to consider when we were first starting out. At that time, he was a great risk taker (with his prose), trying to do something totally new (with his structures), and with a great future ahead of him (if not that masterpiece quite yet). I’m very excited to read this and see how far he’s come. And, in reference to something below, I want to publicly thank him for sending this to our offices. It’s nice to know that we’re still on his radar, and I hope this is , and gets some of that sweet bookseller love.

Translator: Alistair Ian Blythe. I’m honestly��not sure if we’ve met, but if we have and he’s reading this, I am sorry. I really like the Filip Florian book he translated some years ago.

What happened to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt? Are they still around? Not in the international literature game though, right?

Publisher: Of the 18 Dalkey books currently in the Translation Database, were more than 9 readily available in bookstores? It pains me to see how much has changed in the past decade. We only get these books in the office when their author or translator buy extra copies and send them to all the BTBA judges. I do buy as many as possible, but more often than not, the titles I want are delayed and delayed and delayed. Which bums me out. So many fans of Dorothy and Coffee House and Restless and Transit should spend some time with the Dalkey Archive backlist. They would find so many��titles that would blow their minds.

And yes, was roundly ridiculed on Twitter and all the DMs. It doesn’t help that the web address includes the word “intern.” At the same time, the complaint about the $38,000/year salary for someone starting out in publishing—at a nonprofit nonetheless—seems a bit harsh. That said, the idea that this position would be responsible for running a press that was one of the GOATs just a few years ago for, maybe, maximum,��$60,000 (NOT what the current Executive Director earns) is totally bonkers. This job posting has too many contradictions to make most applicants feel comfortable with even applying.

I wish I could do something to help save Dalkey. There’s such a solid core there, but with every year that goes by, they seem to drift further and further out of the conversation—either by choice (refusing to publish books that are “trendy” just to be “in”), or because of lack of marketing expertise, or because they’re mostly in Ireland, or because the books don’t come out when scheduled, or whatever—and that pretty much sucks. This is a press that should be as revered as Graywolf and Coffee House and the like, and yet, I feel like the new literati (for lack of a better term), those who are under 28 and actually��read, don’t have more than a passing familiarity with Dalkey. And that sucks.

It’s interesting to think about their entire history . . . When was the Dalkey heyday? “Birth-1999,” which includes huge successes like��Hopeful Monsters by Mosley,��Chromos��by Felipe Alfau, ���Ի���Wittgenstein’s Mistress��by David Markson? Or is it “2000-2008,” which included the��Third Policeman cameo on��Lost, some of the best years ever in terms of fundraising and sales, and pretty solid penetration into the bookstore market. OR, “2009-Today,” in which Dalkey became multinational, moved to the University of Houston-Victoria, published more works in translation than ever, and expanded all of their funding sources?

Song: “Chop Chop” by Go March

I��loved��the first Go March album (“The Ship of Bambi” in particular), and although this one might not be quite as raw and compelling, it is very polished and hits all of my musical buttons. (Well, most of them. Way back when I wrote about Jeff Rosenstock’s “USA,” which is 8 minutes long, anthemic, and includes a group singalong of the chorus—a song element that gets me��every single time.) This song reminds me a bit of my favorite Battles albums . . . Which makes me want to watch the video for “Atlas.” I love how that song breaks itself down into its various components and then builds back up. This sort of sound architecture is catnip for me.

���Ǵǰ�:��, which is another book that I wrote about earlier this year and which I hope makes the BTBA shortlist.

Translator: Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman. I’ve mentioned this before, but Lo is exactly the sort of literary executor every writer should have. She’s unstoppable in her enthusiasm and dedication to getting more recognition for her father’s work. If only someone would write one long profile of him for NYRB or the��New Yorker . . .��That would most definitely break him out to a much larger audience. And his books are all so damn��good.��

Publisher: David R. Godine, who probably doesn’t get enough credit in the translation world. But look at in the Verba Mundi imprint. Perec, Le Clézio, Modiano (both pre-Nobel), Donoso, Buzzati, Echenoz, Musil, Sabato . . . One could do a lot worst than spend a year reading all of these books.

Life, A User’s Manual��was the first Godine book I ever read. I had the old oversized edition with the puzzle-piece cover. It was unwieldy and mind-breaking. Aside from Calvino’s��If on a winter’s night a traveler, this was the first Oulipian novel I read, and it send me down ����path.��This was one of my entryways into Dalkey’s catalog. Roubaud and Queneau became fundamental authors in my reading constellation, and I wish I could go back in time and rediscover them all over again.

Song: “It Was Not Natural” by Wye Oak

This is an album I was way into around the time of the first NYRF and the last TranslationLoaf. I probably talked about this album too much. Just like with��Civilian, Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack put together a run of three songs that is PHENOMENAL. On this particular album, it’s the album’s title song, “Lifer,” and this. You need to listen to all three in a row. This is my clinamen—I’m cheating and including all three songs on the playlist.

���Ǵǰ�:��Death of a Horse��by Andrés Barba

Translator: Lisa Dillman, who I think I’ve known��forever.��We met somewhere, years and years ago, either at ALTA or in Guadalajara or somewhere else, and she pitched Barba. He’s a blindspot for me. I like��Such Small Hands��better than all his other books, but it’s still not my favorite. He’s the sort of Spanish writer who I think of as��too mannered.��(Remember that for some of the forthcoming January posts.) But Lisa? Lisa is��incredibly talented and wonderful.

I have two memories:

1. She was part of the first panel we put on at the University of Rochester called the “Ecology of Translation.” (Or something like that.) It was 2007, and I still had most of my hair. She came to Rochester and was on a panel with me, Jon Welch from Talking Leaves, and . . . shit. Someone else? Anyway, she told a story about a Big Five Press (HarperCollins? [the question mark makes this���Դdz���libel]) “editing” one of her books from a first-person narrative to third-person. Even if this is a false memory, it totally tracks and seems just as insane in 2018.
2. Last year, I used��Such Small Hands��in my World Lit class. One of the undergrads from the Eastman School questioned the first paragraph of the book, wondering if a few of the first sentences were originally one long sentence, or broken up in the way Lisa had broken them up. Live on a Skype call, she checked the original and told him that he was right—initially it was one long sentence. I love that story for a few reasons.

Publisher: Is Hispabooks still around? If not, then the world is a worse place. But I think they might be gone . . .��No one Tweeted about this book, which would be normal if it were from Open Letter (self burn!), but unusual for a Barba book. And this isn’t promising:

Especially when all the sub-links lead to no longer existing pages . . . Also, did byhisy4i7b take over this website last week? Once upon a time, IN THE DALKEY DAYS, the Context Magazine domain expired—without anyone’s knowledge—and was taken over. I don’t know if anyone would have noticed had I not been on a sales call with the buyer at the University of Arizona Bookstore and had this conversation:

UofA: Is it a joke? I don’t get it.

Chad: What? I don’t . . .

UofA:��Context. Is this a dark joke?

Chad: The Thomas Bernhard cover article?

UofA: The porn.

Chad: The what?

UofA: The porn site where��Context��used to be.

Chad: Well. OK. Well. Hold on. Oh. Oh fuck.

UofA: That’s what I said. So much oh fuck.

Chad: Thank you?

UofA: For . . .what exactly?

Chad: Just. Let’s all hang up now.

Song: “My Lady’s on Fire” by Ty Segall

Thank you Drag City for putting (almost) all of your albums up on Spotify. This was a great 2018 present! Especially all seven million Ty Segall albums. As my best friend from college said, “he has a bit of a Robert Pollard problem.” Which, as someone who writes way way way too much every week, I can totally appreciate. (For reference, Ty Segall has 17 albums on Spotify dating back to 2008; Guided by Voices has 39 since 1987, including several that are quadruple and quintuple size albums.)

���Ǵǰ�:��, which we will be reviewing shortly. There was a snafu. The reviewer has it in hand now. All is well.

�հ����Բ������ٴǰ�:��Karen Emmerich. One-half of my favorite translating family. Full stop.

That should be the whole post, but really, is there a more brilliant and talented translated brother-sister duo than Karen and Michael? NO. THERE IS NOT.

The most impressive aspect of both is that, although they’re genius and operate on intellectual levels I’ve never even dreamed of—possibly because my best dreams are about flying or being a super spy—they’re always incredibly modest and giving and engaged. If this is the future of academia and translating, then there is hope in 2019.

�ʳܲ�����������:��The first time I met Ross from New Vessel we were at BEA. Standing outside of the booth. It was slightly uncomfortable (because *cough*��obviously��Ross and I are both equally as jacked as those dudes) and because I didn’t know this guy and wasn’t sure if he we would be in to my dismissive, sarcastic, woe-is-the-world sense of humor. Not only is Ross the master of the inappropriate joke, but he collects the Ellora’s Cave calendars for his��grandmother. This is how lasting friendships are born: Over underdressed, overly-buff dudes.

Ross was my +1 to the PEN West (America PEN? PEN Of the Other Rockies? HollyPEN? NEVER GETS OLD) Award ceremony.

Also, Ross is the founder of the “Full Ufberg” club. I would post a picture of myself illustrating his signature look, but I as it is lose enough readers every week with my��words. Basically, the “Full Ufberg” is when you button maybe two, mostly just one button on your button-down dress shirt. Let the chest hair fly and be as exposed as possible. And own it. Ufberg that shit UP.

Song: “Tom” by Ed Schraeder’s Music Beat

It wouldn’t be a year in music for me if there wasn’t at least one Dan Deacon song, even if it’s just a song that he helped produce. There are songs on this album that are even more Deacon-esque, but I love how haunting this song is, and you can hear DD’s fingerprints on it.

Book:��, which is quite fun. At least the first story. That’s all I was able to read over my holiday mini-vacation. But it was good! It was about a scientific procedure to let you see a few seconds of your future. This led numerous test subjects to insist that they would do something completely opposite from what they saw, thus proving that they had free will and that the future was not preordained or fixed. But then, each and every one, without fail, for reasons they couldn’t logically fathom, would end up doing exactly what they had seen in their glimpse of the future. Which leads to a sense of utter helplessness in the subjects.

�հ����Բ������ٴǰ�:��Andrew B. B. Hamilton and Claire Y. Van Den Broek. I love both of these names.

Publisher: Seagull Books, the publisher of the most elaborate catalogs of any publisher in the world. Is it overkill? DEFINITELY. But is it also glorious? UNDISPUTEDLY.

This past fall, I went on a U.S. tour for a variety of reasons, and had the chance to hang out with George Carroll and Rick Simonson—two former Seagull Publishing School instructors—and witness their banter and hear their bookselling stories. Rick in particular is deep in with Seagull, and it was so earnest and rewarding and enjoyable. Their friendship, their fandom of the Sounders, the way in which Rick champions Seagull . . . to me, this is exactly the sort of interaction/relationship that reaffirms my belief in books. It enough to make me wish I could retire to Seattle and force them to go to Mariners games 81 times a year.

There are 169 titles from Seagull Books in the Translation Database. That’s an incredible feat. Europa Editions has 168.

Song: “We Don’t Have a Sail but We Have a Rudder” by El Ten Eleven

One of the two best shows I’ve ever been to in Rochester. If you listen to El Ten Eleven, you might assume that it’s a band of 4-5 people futzing around on several different instruments. But no! It’s two guys, a ton of pedals and electronic machines, and some serious ingenuity for crafting sounds. (See note above about sound architecture.) One of the songs they performed ended with one of the guys banging on the other’s double-neck guitar with his drumstick. Watching these songs craft themselves in real life is like witnessing magic.

Book:��, which is fantastically odd. This is a book that merits the label of “experimental,” in part because it may not always work, but it never settles down into something predictable or conventional. The syntax is interestingly twisted throughout, the plot barely ever develops beyond the framing structure (six psychiatric hospital patients, one who killed Dr. Black), and it all culminates in an��At-Swim-Two-Birds��metafictional morass with the characters trying to overthrow the “Omniscient Narratrix.” It’s wild, it’s the sort of book that hipsters will discover ten years from now, and it’s filled with jab after jab at autofiction.

Translator: Dawn M. Cornelio. I am a fan of everyone who uses their middle initial. This can never go wrong. Also, her introduction is SOLID.

Publisher: University of Nebraska. Three-ish-or-so things and some corollaries:

• UNP was our first distributor.
  • When their new director took over—the same person who shut down the bulk of Northwestern’s translation program—she ended their distribution center (which had done fulfillment for Dalkey Archive back in the day) and shuffled us off to Longleaf which then led to Consortium which is mostly Ingram Publishing Services and . . . the arrow only goes in one direction, folks. What you knew will always change at some point. Nothing lasts forever; Everything ends.
• I’m going to do a month of university press books in 2019.
  • I have so many months planned around countries and publishers, but, when I look at my working list, so many University Presses—Yale, Syracuse, Columbia, Nebraska, etc.—are left out. Is there a National University Press Book Appreciation Month? No?
• Recently, I saw a bunch of people on Twitter fall in love with Marie Redonnet’s��Hôtel Splendid, one of the first UNP books I read, way back in the mid-1990s when I was a bookseller and was��compulsive��about reading. I read the trilogy. Stocked it at Quail Ridge Books. Talked about it with John O’Brien when interviewing with Dalkey . . .
  • This recycling of 1990s French authors has tripped me out. Chevillard. Redonnet. Oster. It’s odd enough that the music of my high school days has resurfaced, but the more obscure authors I read from a few decades ago are coming back into fashion? Very odd.

Song: “‘You’ Are the Problem” by Ron Gallo

The other most amazing show I’ve seen in Rochester. Gallo ROCKED. My ears rang for about 17 days. But it was so sweaty and raw and charged and incredible. His new album is really great, and there are any number of songs I could include here, but I feel like this one is the most fitting. I know that��I��am the problem. And I hope that in 2019 I can be less of one, and a better member of the book community. More forgiving and friendly, less cynical and more focused on helping presses like UNP and Seagull and Biblioasis get the attention they might not be getting from other websites. The plans for 2019 Three Percent are extensive and probably unrealizable, but I’m going to give it a go. Hey, I made it through this year of weekly posts. Including the longest one yet in which I officially say goodbye to this series and to badgering all my favorite targets.

Have a safe New Year’s Eve!

I didn’t exactly follow that plan, although there were��a lot��of posts. (Thirty-seven to be exact.) Some are funny, some are catty, some are full-blown critiques, some are pathetic, some are kind of smart. Regardless, for both of you that read more than 60% of these—I hope you enjoyed them all. I don’t think the tone and approach of these posts will die away completely, but I do have a lot of ideas for new things to write in 2019, so stay tuned . . .

In chronological order:

It’s 2018 and Where Have the Translations Gone?

First attempt to compare 2018 translation numbers to years past with less than stellar results.

In Favor of Translator Afterwords

A call for more bad hot takes about books, such as my statement that the translator afterword to Tanizaki’s��In Black and White��is better than the book itself.

A Best-seller Should Be Divisive

One-star reviews of��The Perfect Nanny��drive a general argument that the best best-sellers generate equal amounts of love and hate.

The Best Sports Novels Match Sport and Style

First attempt of the year to write about a book I didn’t like in a way that’s entertaining. Come for the takedown of��Theory of Shadows��and stay for the jokes about Boomer Esiason and Derek Jeter!

Never Fact-Check a Listicle

Again, writing about a book I didn’t like (Frankenstein in Baghdad) and to deflect, I blasted away at Lit Hub and BookMarks. Not a popular article with a lot of people, but I regret nothing! This site exists for spicy takes that question conventional wisdom.

The Translation Industry Is Frozen

It really doesn’t seem like 2018 was a good year for translations. At least in terms of sheer numbers. Also, this title is an obvious reference to last year’s MLB Hot Stove period.

An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing

I think about 95% of these posts include a baseball reference. There’s even a Scott Boras quote in here. (WORTH THE PRICE OF THE CLICK.) Also, this post is one of my five favorite of the year. Mostly to write, but also to revisit.

Noble Expectations

I read a lot of books in 2018 that I didn’t much care for. At least I gave up on this particular book pretty early on.

Everyone Needs an Editor

Another of my favorites, since it actually digs into a particular translation, using three versions (sample, galley, finished copy) to talk about the role of the editor.

Context Is Everything

All the charts are missing (lost in the transition to the new website), but this is a very nerdy attempt to quantify just how poorly literary translations sell when they’re not published by Penguin Random House. (And sometimes even when they are.)

Pathways to Discovering the Obscure?

This is a more serious post about the ways in which we end up finding out (or not) about cult authors. The great writers who aren’t on year-end lists.

9 Moments That Make “Tomb Song” the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation

Man, I was really wrong with this one! Although I’ll stick to my belief in “pinche”��over “friggin.”

This Headline’ll Make You MAD, MAD!

Still don’t like��Trick, still think the Will Self interview is fascinating.

Thinking About Book Reviews

When I came up with this idea of writing a dialogue about all the problems of reviewing books in translation, I mostly wanted to take the piss out of myself. I had already received a lot of “pushback” about the earlier 2018 articles and wanted to demonstrate that I got it, that my overall viewpoint is suspect and can be torn apart.��I’m not actually that grumpy this is all a game!��I was more afraid that I would rely on this trick over and over again. Thank god I didn’t.

Death by Poetry and The Lies about Me

The poetry stats are interesting and all that, but scroll to the middle and watch Chad Post’s “Unlovable” video. YOU’RE WELCOME.

Spanish Literature Is Our Favorite Scene

Rochester jokes never get old.

Poetry Presses and Radical Idea #1

Every great idea on this website should be partially credited to ESPN writer (and Effectively Wild co-founder and former host) Sam Miller. Especially the “radical ideas” series.

What if Writers Were Treated Like Soccer Players?

Quite literally the best post of the year. And the one idea that I would�����DZ�����to institute.

May Is a Month of Grading

Presumably a post about translation stats through the month of May, but really a chance to make jokes about jacket copy.

The Crime in the Data

This breakdown became even more sophisticated by the end of the year. But this is the origin of the category breakdown. BONUS: More radical ideas for publishing!

9 Comp Authors for Dag Solstad, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Listicle

I kind of goofed on James Wood in this article, and, well, he ended up reading it. And liked it!

 

9 Books Likely to Win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award

Any guesses as to why I always use “9” in my dumb listicles?

Selection Bias, Best Translations, and Where Are the Women in Translation From?

Lot of data on books by women in translation. And a couple of short reviews. Along with a little discussion of selection bias, which is a hobby horse that fuels a lot of the underlying critiques spouted here throughout the year.

A Whole Lot of Blather

Another post that made people angry! Includes a bit about nonprofits and the indie press All-Star team.

The Very Pleasant Post

Not actually super pleasant or positive, although there is a lot of good stuff about��Pretty Things��to offset the other stuff . . . mostly.

The Simple Pleasures of Reading

So much Sam Miller! And an attempt to explain why two unheralded (and one��uber-heralded) books can take you back to the basics of why we enjoy reading.

Publishing Strategies of Rediscovery

I’m pretty sure that every person who has read Stig Dagerman has stumbled onto this post and emailed me about how great��Wedding Worries��is. Which means that there are hundreds of you out there who need to go get this book.

Missed Opportunities (Here’s the NBA Translation Post I Promised)

Another post in which I’m shitty.

A Frozen Imagination

I can’t wait to go back to Iceland. And I can’t wait to do a Two Month Review season on��CoDex 1962.

It’s the Postseason! [Welcome to October]

Big overview of translation statistics for 2018, which includes a bit of analysis about which months are most popular for publishing translations.

The Icelandic Connection

One of the two posts that inspired most of the plan for Three Percent in 2019 . . . This kicked off a series of posts about Deep Vellum.

My Struggle, Part I: Confusion and Value

One of the five best posts of the year. Mainly because it fully adopts the viewpoint of ����reader.��Not a critic, publisher, bookseller, or translator. It was one of the most difficult to write, although I did go into a bit of fugue state and just let all of this come out.

A Rat, a Labyrinth, “Ah Library TNT”?

Deep Vellum and the Oulipo.

My Struggle, Part II: The 60% Post

This joke will never, ever get old. (And lands about 60% of the time.)

The Fault in Our Numbers

More imaginary math couched around the question of what creates value.

Maybe These Days Will Be Over, Over Soon

Essentially the prelude to February 2019’s feature on Quebec literature.

All the Cameras in Japan

A breakdown by region of the translations published in 2018 along with a number of charts about my own reading habits over the past decade.

I also know the title for the final post of the year, and the complicated (re: nonsensical) matrix behind it. (I can not wait to work on this.)

Which left one last post (this one!) to try and bring together a bunch of remaining threads from earlier in the year. Looking through my list of potential blog post ideas, nothing really seemed to be appropriate.

• The most obscure books in the translation database from the most obscure presses. (An anti- list and I just want to leave everyone alone for the holidays.);
• An update on the sales numbers from all the January translations + lots of math. (Too depressing right now and the graphs all went missing.);
• A look at Lit Hub’s mammoth “” list in hopes that it will show that success is usually found by the new (new press, debut author) or the super established—demolition of the middle. (Not very interesting and the list is too long to parse.);
• Five things that would revolutionize the publisher-bookseller relationship. (Way too much work.);
• A summary of the 2018 translation statistics. (Writing that for��Publishers Weekly��and can expand on it here after the article is published.);
• An analysis of the translators��who have had the most work published over the past eleven years and if that’s consistent from one year to the next or a bit random. (SAVE FOR 2019!);
• Prisoner’s Dilemma and Game Theory as it relates to publishing (see Winter Institute) and the desire to defect/compete rather than collaborate. (Again, save for later);
• Fake jacket copy for my ten favorite books of the year, without ever identifying which books those were—a guessing game for the well-read. (Can you be more pretentious?);
• A self-trolling post in which I look at the books I wrote about 10 years ago, and what’s changed in my approach over those years. Like, apparently, a few years back I wrote something called “The Problem with Book Awards [Why America Sucks, Part Infinity]”? I’m sure that’s a 100% rational post. (THIS SERIES IS ALREADY TOO SELF-INDULGENT.).

Since these all sucked/were too much work, and since I had declared publicly (aka on a podcast) that the rest of my December was going to be reading for fun (lie!), I thought I’d read��The Lady Killer��by Masako Togawa and build some sort of post around that.

The Lady Killer��by Masako Togawa, translated from the Japanese by Simon Grove (Pushkin Vertigo)

Last week I talked a bit about the sexiness of Coach House’s paper. Well. Pushkin Vertigo is the exact opposite, and yet I find the precarious production values in these books to be incredibly appealing. It’s such a weird tradition for British presses to produce such ephemeral products. (Books that go the way of the British Empire, but in months, instead of centuries! Not funny, I know. But, maybe, kind of funny.) As I was reading this, I kept waiting for chunks of pages to simply fall out, or for the pages to instantly yellow in the sun—and there was something fittingly pulpy about all of that. All these Pushkin Vertigo books are designed in the same disposable way, and I think I love it.

In terms of this particular title, it’s written by a cabaret performer turned mystery writer who passed away a couple years ago and is considered to be one of Japan’s greatest crime writers. She has one other book in this series—The Master Key—which won a prestigious award, and which I’m planning on buying from next week.

Quick digression: LOOK AT THIS FUCKING PALACE

What you��can’t��see is the cafe/bar in the back AND the performance space where Consortium held its sales conference party and where old punks rock the fuck out most every night. This is my Shangri-La and I want one here in Rochester.

Anyway, the plot of��The Lady Killer: A dude who physically can’t have sex with his wife, but can totally get down with random women he seduces at bars, gets one of his “conquests” pregnant. Six months later, she kills herself, in part because she’s pregnant with his child. Shortly after that, the women he’s with—all detailed in sterile, offensive ways in his “hunter’s diary,” which, yes, is maybe the worst thing—start turning up dead. He’s convicted because his rare blood type is found at every scene along with matching semen. But a lawyer thinks it’s all a frame-up. (That’s British-speak, I believe.) He and his employee start investigating, and the mystery unfolds bit by bit to a somewhat surprising ending.

(I have no idea how to judge the “surprisingness” of a twist ending in a crime novel. I don’t read enough of them to have a baseline for what’s “normal” and “expected.” But in the crime novels I have read—small sample size!—they all end with a bit of a twist, which, because I’m generally waiting for a twist, makes the twist not all that twisty. Is there a game theory to writing mysteries? What I mean is, do you get added benefit—more dedicated readers—by having one out of every five books end the way everyone expected it? But would that mean that it would end with the most obvious twist? Or could you start a mystery novel by declaring the main suspect on page one and then again in the final paragraph, with absolutely zero doubt in the middle as to that character’s guilt? Didn’t see that one coming! She played it straight!)

Initially, I thought The Lady Killer��was making it into English for the first time ever, but the Human Bibliography of International Fiction, Michael Orthofer, set me straight about this being a reprint. (Weird that��Publishers Weekly reviewed it, but not as weird as��Kirkus putting��Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories��on their “Best of 2018” list—a book they originally reviewed in 1996.) Which short-circuited my idea of making this the focus of a post, since the initial premise was to read 52 new translations over 2018 and write about one each week.

Not a recommended course of action. Just as there are only about 50-75 “great” bookstores in America, there are only ever about 25-30 “great” translations to come out in a year. And the more one ages, the less time one wants to spend reading something they just don’t care about. Which brings us to . . .

Seventeen��by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (FSG)

I tried to read Yokoyama’s earlier book,��Six Four, but couldn’t get into it. It seemed interesting enough, but there are soooooo many words on every page that don’t really need to be there. A good book doesn’t need to describe��everything.��My sense—and this is unfair given that I read about 60 pages of a 9 million page novel—is that his prose doesn’t leave enough space for the reader to imagine anything. And the best reading experiences are only half-directed, with the other half being supplied by the reader.

Seventeen��is a book about journalism and a plane crash. That’s cool! And the prose is as workmanlike as can be. It’s as if it were 350 pages of a craft seminar on declarative simplicity.

There was nothing to do but wait. The layout of the city news pages had been completed. It consisted entirely of the Kyodo articles Nozawa had been working on. The moment they received Sayama’s draft, they would switch it around. The plan was in place, but still the phone didn’t ring. Time was steadily creeping up on Yuuki.

Anxiety was stalking him, too. Since night had fallen, there had been one piece of bad news after the other.

I know this isn’t a term, but this is what I think of as “lock-step writing.”��A and then B which follows A and both are standard, logical events that progress in ways that everyone can imagine.��

Honestly: Why do people��like��books like this?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a shitty book or anything—it’s just utterly forgettable from a style standpoint.

Why do people like books that lack style?

These are the same people who complain that are books are “too demanding” and don’t have “easy to pitch plots.”

Yeah! I know! What are books?

*

I gave up on��Seventeen.��I only have so many more days to live, books to read. And, so far, I’ve finished 101 books this year. Not particularly impressive, but I hit my goal. (And will likely finish a few more before 2019.)

Because I’m an über-nerd who is��a little too into��Excel spreadsheets, I have a list of every book I’ve read (or read��part of) going back to 2007. Not only that—I have them categorized by author’s country of origin and language. And whether they were written by a man or a woman. I was Goodreads before Goodreads was LibraryThing. (NERD JOKE ALERT.) Yes, you’re right, junior high wasn’t very fun . . .

The funniest thing about that chart of how many books I read that were in translation vs. originally written in English is that it perfectly captures why I like rolling-average charts better than single-year ones. Look at 2010. In isolation, it looks rather dramatic. But, if you take into account the three-year average for both lines (e.g., total titles 2007-2009/3 = 2009 number, 2008-2010/3 = 2010 number, etc.), things get��a bit smoother:

Quantifying your interior life is a very weird thing to do.

*

What I’ve never tracked is the books I’ve read by��region.��

When I was at Quail Ridge Books, in the time just before Y2K ruined the world, I organized an “International Literature” section. This is a controversial move today—”why separate translations? A good book is a good book is a good book. Don’t put international lit in a ghetto!”—but in 1999, there was almost zero attention being paid to international literature, and putting these titles in with the regular fiction didn’t normalize their existence, but rather masked them so that you could grab Charles Frazier’s��Cold Mountain��while not even seeing��Carlos Fuentes’s��Terra Nostra.��

(Another post idea: Irrationality and Perceptual Bias in a Bookstore Setting. Sounds academic. Maybe I could finally get an advanced degree by writing . . . no. Never going to happen. At this point I feel like it’s a badge of honor to���Դdz���have an MA or PhD or whatever. I always wanted to have one . . . to be in academia, but I’m too far gone now. I’m stationed in a part of the world in which business and culture fight and fuck and advanced degrees don’t matter as much as sales trends and the cult of personality. Besides, if I ever have to write like an academic again, I may lose the last remaining sliver of my dignity.)

After getting permission from my bosses to make this section—have I written this before? Is everything just a rewrite of a rewrite done in an insomniac fog? Just wait till you read��The Dreamed Part��and that reference will land—I figured out that I absolutely��had��to group things into regions instead of countries. Which is, inherently, fraught. To what region do you file Turkey? Algeria? Morocco? Turkistan?

I did what I thought made sense, and committed to revising the groupings every time someone brought up a thought-out complaint. This happened once or twice, which is a long way of saying: These charts are inherently fucked. I know that. I’m just trying to cull something interesting from the Translation Database (still down!) that might signify something.

Here’s a chart of 2018 fiction broken down by arbitrary regions.

Unsurprisingly, Western Europe (Italy + Spain + Germany + France + you get the picture) dominated, with 37.40% of all fiction translations published. But, then, Asia! You know what? Because Rachel Cordasco is ����fanatic��about finding translated Japanese books. No offense of anyone, but these Japanese “light novels”? Holy crap are there a LOT of them. And each one sounds more insane and like YA-bullshit than the last.

The human realm of the kingdom is headed for its greatest disaster yet! After failing to prevent a daring raid on the Eight Fingers’ appalling brothel, the Six Arms are dying for a chance to defend their reputation as the criminal underworld’s strongest enforcers. These criminals are notorious for their brutality as much as their strength, meaning the only people who stand a chance against them are the legendary Blue Roses . . . and one polite, dignified butler. When these thugs make Sebas the first target of their revenge, they may get much more than they bargained for by inadvertently picking a fight with Ainz Ooal Gown!

OK, cool. Appalling brothels, enforcers, Blue Roses, Ainz Ooal Gown—GOT IT.

This is, quite literally, the description to��.��

How does this measure up against the poetry published in 2018?

Well, that’s��different.��(Read that with a Minnesotan accent.) In terms of poetry, Latin Americ����dominates.��That’s a strong 32+% for poets mostly from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.

Put all the numbers together and you get this:

Western Europe is above Asia which is above Latin America which is above Scandinavia . . . This totally tracks. French/German/Spanish always dominate, although there are some indications that this stranglehold isn’t going to last forever.

And, from a value exploitation/game theory/Moneyball��perspective, there’s a shitload of value to be found by honing in on the regions at the lower end of this chart. Africa and the Middle East, obviously, but also Russia and Eastern Europe.

*

You know what would make all my research much more interesting and valuable? Access to Nielsen BookScan. As flawed as it might be at capturing��total��sales, it’s incredibly useful for correlating production and sales. I could do��sooooo much��if someone would just give me a password. (Spoiler Alert: Nielsen denied me. And Consortium/Ingram only gives us info on our own books.) I feel like I’m being denied my intellectual freedom . . . or, whatever. If I had a PhD in data science they’d probably give me access . . .

*

The first person to email or text me with the lyric following the title of this post will get a collection of a few of my favorite books. (Which is super easy, since the title of the post is also the title of the song. And “the best play in American football” is not right.)

*

So here’s the thing: I need to leave this series behind; I want to do something new; I don’t want to lose these nights of writing in this particular voice. (I’ve said it before, but writing these posts is like some sort of performative therapy. If I lost this, I might lose myself.)

Reading two Japanese books in a row reminded me of a weird/nerdy thing I did back in college: On every winter/summer break, I would read a bunch of books each month that fit within a particular grouping. “Books by Women.” “Science Fiction.” “Latin American Classics.” And as forced and silly as that was? I liked it. I made connections that were maybe there, maybe not. I spent too much time with card catalogs trying to learn about particular pairs of authors that were likely as random as they were intertwined.

That’s what 2019 is going to be. A return to reading as exploration.

If 2018 was a way of evaluating the cultural side of the publishing world through new translations, 2019 will be about exploring sets of books, as books, from a reader’s perspective.

Here’s what you can expect:

• January is going to focus on Spain. I’ll write an intro post with shittons of stats about books from Spain. And will follow that with weekly rambles about Spanish books translated from Castilian, Galician, Basque, and Catalan;
• Several interviews a month with translators—established and up-and-coming, but mostly the latter;
• Months in which I try and focus on publishers doing work from a region (like all the Quebecois publishers) and months in which I take a new book and try and work backward (chronologically) through its influences;
• More samples, because I want to promo our forthcoming titles and give translators a space to share passion projects;
• A monthly “What You Missed” post to counter all the “You Must Read X in Y!” posts that already exist. This will include translation stats and highlights of books that weren’t necessarily “trendy”;
• Every month we’ll feature a backlist Open Letter author and offer a discount on their title(s). These selections will only sometimes be synergistic with all that’s listed above . . .

I don’t know that I’ll actually follow through on all the posts already plotted out for January, but, then again, I didn’t plan to finish this series on “A Year of Reading New Translations” (I’m nothing if not a quitter), but I’m two posts away and feeling nostalgic.

Hug your loved ones over the holidays, and come back next week for a highlight reel, and on 12/30 for “10 x 10 x 10: Everything Comes to an End.”

Oh, Canada. That country Americans remember exists every time we elect a fascist.

I do actually want to try and write about��Catherine Leroux’s stunning��Madame Victori����(a finalist for zero U.S.-based translation awards this year) ���Ի���David Turgeon’s incredibly fun��The Supreme Orchestra (also zero longlist appearances)—or at least want to try and convince you to buy these—but first I want to have some fun with charts and numbers!

According to the Translation Database—which, yes, I know you can’t access it right now, but that’s because someone/thing/group/Country? was using it to launch a DDOS attack on��Publishers Weekly‘s website, which, NOT COOL—there were 97 works of Quebecois fiction published and distributed in America since 2008. Which is behind Argentina (124), tied with Israel (99), and slightly ahead of Brazil (91). Good showing!

(Putting this into imaginary sabermetrics of publishing terms, and given that the average books created [BC] per country between 2008-2018 is 36.07, then, in terms of BC+ in which 100 is average and higher equals more, Quebec comes is hard with a 274 BC+. Cool. Yeah. I’ll let myself out . . . )

Two observations: 1) this is some really steady growth for books from Quebec making their way into the U.S., and I have no idea why that really is, but I applaud it; and 2) what happened in 2016? Sure,����started publishing that year, but they didn’t do��eight��books. For whatever reason—bad data? Consortium signing on more Canadian presses? a few Quebecois hits?—the number of titles from Quebec��doubled��between 2015 and 2016. Not that 16 books is an��astonishing��amount or anything (although it is good for an incredible 487 BC+ . . .), but it’s something worth noting.

*

Actually, that should be the title of this post: THE 20 HOTTEST AUTHORS FROM THE HOTTEST NEW TREND IN INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING! GET YOUR QUEBECOIS LIT NOW AND IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS.

Which makes me wonder: How many literary websites cover Quebecois literature with any degree of frequency? Let’s do some Googling.

[Note: Louise Penny is from Quebec, but writes in English.]

I’m not sure that Three Percent has been much better. (Although three articles plus some reviews isn’t the worst.) If you really want to know about Quebecois writers and publishers, go to�������Ի���.��(Duh and or obviously, I know.) Or, if you want to drink from the source, check out��.��

*

This post is already a bit childish, and I can’t promise that it’s not going to get worse. I want to put my snarky ways behind me, I want these days to be over, but I’m stuck in a juvenile rut, raging against awards like a sore loser and spitting from a distance at the giants of the literary internet. Why? It always has been fun to craft fun takedowns and bitter jokes. And raging at the world because it doesn’t have to be like this (can we��please��decide that rather than letting one bad thing open the doorway for��everything��to be bad we can just isolate that mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen ever again?) comes as much from a place of idealism as an attempt to destroy.

And yet, I know that all year I’ve been poking at LitHub—a site people actually visit, like 200,000,000 of them a month, if, if you believe their stats (sorry, just exaggerating because I’m a child)—for their dumb lists and the “Rotten Tomatoes” aspects of BookMarks. And why? Jealousy? Because they’re an easy target? Just to make bad jokes? Yep. All true.

But we’re three posts away from abandoning this year-long project and moving on to a reimagined Three Percent. Now with 50% fewer insults!

That said, there’s something about books and reading that will always remain childish to me. Maybe it’s because I spent 99% of my childhood in a treehouse alone reading literally any text I could get my hands on. (I once read a series of manuals on how to program in BASIC because they were there.)

I’d like to think it’s more though.

As snooty as I am about books, there is always an atavistic aspect to my reading. For a lot of people, a similar itch is scratched by “strong plots” and “recognizable characters” and the feeling of escaping your current life. (Is anyone’s current life as glorious as they hoped it would turn out?) Escape is a rather juvenile emotion.

Maybe I want to promote puzzle-books and texts that make you mentally work because I want to feel superior.

Maybe I want to promote puzzle-books and texts that make you mentally work because there’s a huge joy to be had in figuring things out.

Maybe I want to promote puzzle-books and texts that make you mentally work because elitism.

Maybe I want to promote puzzle-books and texts that make you mentally work because no one else seems to be doing this anymore.

These columns shouldn’t be about me, I know, but I just spent a year reading over 100 titles, almost all new works in translation, just to get a broader sense of what international writing is being published and how it’s all being received and digested.

And I didn’t exactly enjoy it.

*

Every time I hear a mean joke about being Canadian, I go to the hospital and get my feelings checked for free.

Canadian jokes are pretty much the worst. I thought I could find a lot of semi-offensive, funny ones, but and and ? I’m starting to lose my respect for our northern neighbors! Seriously, this?

Q: How many Newfoundlanders does it take to fix a toilet?

A: Wait, when did they get indoor plumbing?

C’mon. Even us Poles have better digs than that.

*

Who publishes Quebecois authors in translation?

I left off all the presses that did one Quebec book over the past eleven years from this chart. The majority seem to be one-offs anyway, Akashic’s��Montreal Noir, a Dalkey book, books from Shambhala and Soft Skull, etc. Most of all the presses listed in that chart (Archipelago and their Jacques Poulin and Oneworld and their Denis Theriault titles aside) are based in Canada. Where there is government funding to translate Quebec lit—on top of a lot of other government monies for publishing in general—and where you would assume there would be a greater interest in books from fellow Canadians than here in the United States.

But that’s wrong and based on bad assumptions.

On the factual side of things, a couple publishers on the list above told me they sell more copies of their Quebecois titles here in the States than in Canada.

And why��wouldn’t Americans be interested in authors from Quebec? As readers we’ve (theoretically) become more open to literature in translation, thanks to��Words Without Borders, the National Book Foundation, ALTA, and many other champions of international writing. Population-wise, we could easily take over Canada if every citizen disgruntled with Trump were to emigrate. Even as a numbers game, America should buy more Quebecois books than Canadians. (Is this where I should say “suck it, Canucks! We’re more open-minded!” No? OK. Never mind. That’s soooo juvenile. Writing about literature isn’t like playing the PS4.)

But, let’s play a game. Be honest and read through this list of names and skip to the next paragraph when you recognize one of them. (If you’re semi-invested in Canadian culture, then stop when you hit a name of an author you’ve��read. If you’re��P. T. Smith, well, don’t play.)

Nelly Arcan

Philippe Arseneault

Francois Barcelo

Jean-Philippe Baril Guerard

Camille Bouchard

Stephane Bourguignon

Louis Carmain

Veronique Cote

Martine Delvaux

Martine Desjardins

Claudine Dumont

Alain Farah

Jean-Michel Fortier

Joanna Gruda

Dany Laferriere (OK, skip away)

Bertrand Laverdure

Patrice Martin

Eric Plamondon

Monique Proulx

Dominique Scali

Larry Tremblay

Elise Turcotte

Melissa Verrault

If you’ve read more than one-quarter of those authors, please email or call or text me. I want to talk to you and learn.

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One last personal reflective section, then, I promise, we’ll talk about books.

(I probably shouldn’t have made a “Juvenilia” Spotify playlist to listen to while I write this, although, to be honest, I love all these songs and all the emotions associated with them.)

This morning’s Two Month Review live videocast was not my best moment. I want to live in a world in which I use that phrase—”not my best moment”—less than once a month. OK, fair. Less than once a week.

Apologies all said and aside, there is something in my frustration that I can’t let go of. I honestly feel like back in the day, back��before��the World Wide Web conquered our every waking second, our imaginations, our ability to communicate and connect, it was easier to find subcultures that saw the value in “difficult” art and promoted it widely—not as an alternative to “good,” “readable,” “digestible” art, but as something everyone could get into with the right set of friends. Or right set of words, perhaps in a publication, conveyed in the right sort of way.

Context, the Dalkey Archive publication I helped work on when I was there, and distributed for free through Quail Ridge Books before I left the selling side for the producing one—Context��was that publication in so many ways. Sure, I’m a fan of LARB and Quarterly Conversation and NYRB and whatever. All great, great. Still, I miss the free quarterly publication that was unflinching in its dedication to obscure, challenging authors whose works are so rewarding if we redirect our focus from sales and buzz and twee covers and who we know.

I’m probably wrong, but I feel like there are whole generations of amazing authors that are totally unknown these days. Writers like Gilbert Sorrentino. Kathy Acker. Others.

God, I’m getting old. (And all the lyrics in “Silver Moons”—currently playing!—are slaying me.)

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Madame Victori����by Catherine Leroux, translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler (Biblioasis, 6 Quebecois titles since 2008)

I’m pretty sure that, if I were to ask our new marketing director what the cool kids say about books they like these days, he would reply with “gif.”

I’m��literally��punching myself in the face.

So, anyway, here’s the logline for��Madame Victoria:

In modern-day Montreal, a skeleton is uncovered in the woods behind the Victoria hospital. No one knows, and no one claims, the body. It’s nicknamed “Madame Victoria” and becomes a legend of sorts. Scientists know a few things about her life—she moved a number of times, etc.—but it takes the imagination of Catherine Leroux (The Party Wall, which, Chad interjection here, I’m so fucking psyched to read) to really bring Victoria to life.

Over the course of twelve different vignettes, Leroux explores an incredible variety of possibilities for who Madame Victoria was and how she ended up there. To go hyperbolic: This book is like looking at a quantum cloud of possibilities. I know Dan Wells (publisher, Biblioasis, stand-up dude, which, if I’m at all in touch with the youth, is���Դdz���a phrase anyone uses) likes to compare this to the Goldberg Variations, which also makes sense given that certain things recur—”Eon,” which sometimes appears as a whiskey (YES!), sometimes as a person (BOO), or the appearance of a character with eyes of different colors—in new patterns time and again.

The fact that these stories are set in a variety of times, including a man who becomes Victoria, veer off into the supernatural, and never become staid or predictable—that’s a feat.

I’m willing to bet that 1000% more readers of this post have read Jenny Erpenbeck’s��End of Days��than knew five authors on the list above. Here’s a hot take for you:��Madame Victori����is the book��End of Days��wishes it was. BOOOOOOM!

For me, the Erpenbeck book—which I quite like—is too rigorous with its intent. Once you know the pattern, nothing new happens. It’s a bit too formulaic, as if structure were��all��you needed to write a book. (If that were true, I would be cranking out words on something that maybe some foolish publisher would publish!)

Madame Victori����is so much more imaginative. Leroux lays down her thesis, her structure right from the start and then innovates in ways that the Erpenbeck book never does.��Madame Victori����is jazz to��The End Of Days‘s house beats.

Buy it. If you��don’t like it/see the craft, let me know and I’ll give you a free Open Letter book in its place. Three if you buy it from .

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That “Juvenilia” playlist? Well, “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”

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��by David Turgeon, translated by Pablo Strauss (Coach House Books, 10��Quebecois titles since 2008)

The paper in every Coach House book is so sexy.

But also, if you like Jean Echenoz, you NEED NEED NEED to buy this book.

I’m not going to give away the plot at all here, because it’s a book that deserves to tell itself, but I will say that as you unpuzzle this, you’ll see that it’s not an unusual plot—at least in relation to other spy novels—but that it is rearranged in an interesting way.

And what a jaunty tone of writing! It’s that tone that reminds me of Echenoz. It’s playful. Funny. Strange characters. A bit off-kilter in a sexy way. I devoured this book.

I’m not going to tell you what “the supreme orchestra” is—it might be a big band, it might be a country, it might be a jewel, it might be a plot—because I think you owe it to yourself to check this book out.

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I don’t want to abandon this tone. This freewheeling-ness that’s both overly earnest and too honest and embarrassed and yes—juvenile. It’s too fun.

But it’s almost time.

Next week: Regions.

Last week of 2018: A list to end all lists.

If you’ve read all of this? Thanks.

the cigarette consumed itself inside her body, her extraordinary body, 70 percent water, 30 percent smoke, and I could not understand it

—The Nocilla Lab

(Sales(S) x List Price(P)) x Readership® – Fixed Operating Expenses(FOE) – Printing(PR) – Author Payment(AP) – Translator Payment(TP) – Marketing Costs(MC) = True Profit(RP)

—Chad W. Post, “An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing“

Given that this post is sort of about Agustín Fernández Mallo’s “The Nocilla Trilogy,” (translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, forthcoming from FSG) it doesn’t feel as pretentious and out-of-place to quote myself at the beginning as it usually would. This trilogy foregrounds its pretentiousness, its desire to self-reference, its commitment to being a work of performance art (or a work that details a series of various pieces of performance art, each one more performan-cy than the last, such as “Steve’s Restaurant,” where one of the main characters—although “main” feels too strong, maybe “rhizomatic,” since this book is more about landscape than plot and does reference Deleuze and Guattari��—runs a conceptual restaurant where he bakes up Spider-Man figurines and decides to “cook the horizon” in a way that’s simultaneously compelling and a bit eye-roll-y.

Although all my notes for this post derive from what I perceive as the “flaw” in these novels—plus the cultural perception of that “flaw”—it seems like a much nicer opening to start by saying some nice things about this book.

First off, the design of the three-volume slipcase book is��gorgeous.��(I’m nothing if not superficial.) And the books themselves are quite fun to read. Julio Cortázar appears as a character. P. J. Harvey is namechecked. Fragmented, non-linear (or, again, maybe the best word is actually “rhizomatic”), crammed with minor ideas and major philosophies, characters upon characters, literary games and slippages that evoke the best of Vila-Matas, a whole that resists the temptation to become a singular, comprehensible “whole.”

All of these elements are right in my wheelhouse, and I do think that, if those elements appeal to you, these books (I keep saying that and should explain . . . “The Nocilla Trilogy” is made up of��The Nocilla Dream, The Nocilla Experience,�����Ի���The Nocilla Lab) are worth checking out. Even if they don’t add up to any grand statement about being or art, they are incredibly engaging to read and feel very sui generis.��Lots of great lines that double as great statements—some of which I’ll pepper throughout this post, which is, admittedly, not really about��“The Nocilla Trilogy” much at all—worth underlining and tweeting and recalling at random introspective moments.

It also contains a section in which a character meets with “a handful of executives from New Directions” and convinces them both to publish his book—a novel pieced together out of the opening lines from dozens of famous books—and to take out billboards throughout Madrid advertising it. This is all a bit crazy—and again, these novels are mostly about representing various works of conceptual art—but not as crazy as the reference to New Directions being based in Philadelphia. If it had been Pittsburgh, that would make sense, since that’s were James Laughlin was born. But Philly? It is true that Declan Spring lives in Philly, so maybe this section is some sort of weird appeal to him?

The equation that links the time on the 2 clocks is: T’/T = [1 – v²/c²] –��½. But this being so, we come to the so-called Twin Paradox: perhaps we may all turn out to be mistaken twins living out of step with everyone else, desynchronized by journeys near the speed of light. When this light ceases, you die.

—The Nocilla Experience

(Pace of Reading(PAC) x Length(LEN)) x (Character Connections(CC) x Plot Points(PP)) x Buzz(BUZZ) = Reading Desirability(DES)

—Chad W. Post, “An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing“

If you stick with this till the end, I’m 60% sure it’ll all make sense. But for now, we’re going to swerve into math and valuation.

One of the main things I love about baseball are the statistics. Not the old-school baseball card variety of batting average and wins and ERA and RBI. The more modern post-Moneyball��shit. The stuff that is nerdy and that most people despise for making the game “less fun.” (Next time you’re at the ballpark [HA!], try referencing the Run Expectancy for any given situation. “With men on first and second with no outs, we are expected to score 1.373 runs.” And be sure to duck the beer that will be thrown at you.)

(While we’re hanging out in these parentheses, does knowing quantifiable percentages actually make the game more or less fun? Every game is almost as long as a tackleball game and is loaded with failure—failure to make contact, failure to make pitches—and I’m hard pressed to see how pointing out someone’s wRC+ is as detrimental as the 90,000 times the batter adjusts his batting gloves. It’s a jocks vs. nerds thing, I know, I know. But still.)

What’s most interesting to me about the rise of sabermetrics and its impact on baseball analysis is the way in which the fundamental approach intersects with various ideas from behavioral economics: namely that the “eye-test” isn’t 100% reliable because our brains aren’t perfect computers.

There’s some Bill James quote related to this. I don’t have it in front of me, but, paraphrasing, it’s more or less along the lines that the difference between a .300 batter (all-star! good!) and a .280 hitter (fine, but not remarkable) is one extra hit��every two weeks. That’s something that, sans infographics and announcers and the Elias Sports Bureau and Fangraphs we would most certainly��not notice��no matter how closely we paid attention to a particular team.

Taking that one step further, if you, whoever you are and whatever sport you like, were in charge of a group of people trying out—all of whom were professional athletes—how confident are you that you could discern which 9 were the absolute best? What would it actually take to distinguish between various��quality��players?

To answer my own rhetorical question: You probably wouldn’t be very good at it. Instead you would rely on a system of heuristics that value A over B��because��. . . “He’s big and can hit the ball far, so he’s good.” “That guy is fast and therefore will likely be good on the bases and at defense,” etc. Our brains are imperfect machines prey to a variety of perceptual biases (confirmation bias, recency bias, etc.), and capable of being manipulated in so many different ways. (�� )

Definition of Closed Ball: A ball b is a closed ball if its complementary set (R_a-b) is open

Each is considered an open set in the space Rⁿ, though it can be defined as a diffuse space if the two balls intersect it.

—The Nocilla Experience

Turnover(TO) x Cash Profit(CP) x Hipster Quotient(HQ) = Indie Stock(IND)

—Chad W. Post, “An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing“

I’m probably just an idiot, but I had no idea what “Nocilla” was when I started reading this book. I assumed it was something all chic and Spanish amazing (Span-azing?), like IKEA + Tempranillo + paella. WRONG! It’s just Spanish Nutella.

Which, cool? I guess? I mean, Nutella is pretty great . . . Although if this had been called “The Nutella Trilogy” I would never, in a hundred million years, have picked it up. I would’ve assumed it was a foreign version of��The Chocolate War��or some other YA nonsense.��Game of Thrones��+ breakfast. A moralistic fable from your dentist. Something about bad kissing.

But���Դdz���������?—pronounced “no-CHEE-a” or “NO-see-ya” or “no-SILL-ah,” and since there’s no possible way to find out which is right, we’ll write all three—sounds baller.

This title might add value to the book itself . . . for a gringo.

Definition of Open Ball: Let a be a point in R_n��and let r be a given positive number. The set of all points x in R_n such that the distance between x and a is less than r

|x – a| < r

is called an open��n-ball of radius��r��and center��a. We denote this set by B[a] or by B[a; r]*, applicable to all systems, spaces, or persons that are receptive to apparently random searches of all kinds.

—The Nocilla Experience

Sales(S)

—Chad W. Post, “An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing“

Here’s what I actually want to talk about—not baseball, not Nutella: the��value��of books. And this section here?, it’s a bit of heavy lifting. But again, I’m 60% sure this will all tie together in the end and make sense, and 60% sure that my final joke will��land.

We tend to conflate��value��with��price.��Just look at the coverage of that recent sale of the Banksy artwork that destroyed itself immediately after being sold for $1.4 million. ��Valuable.��(And that’s���Դdz���from Buzzfeed, or any other site that relies upon community tweets to build out 90%+ of its content.)

What is anything “worth”? Whatever someone is willing to pay. This is a truism, but when you stop to think about it, prices start to seem very arbitrary and weird. Sure, there are fixed costs that set a baseline for the price of your Starbucks coffee, but you/me/the world have almost no idea what those costs are, and instead are willing to accept a 5000% markup because $3 for ����venti seems about fair.

Pricing Theory is crazy. You can get people to pay for melted Spider-Man figures through novelty and a write-up in the��New Yorker. People who study pricing figure out how to extract the most “customer surplus” by looking at what people are “willing to pay” and then employing some fancy math. (Along with various schemes like versioning to make sure that people who are willing to pay more than others have the opportunity to fork over the maximum amount.) Prices are determined by what will make the company the maximum amount of profit.

But��the price of something is not its value.��Value��lasts longer. It means deeper. It’s not about the price coded into the barcode (money feels so artificial at times), but about a lasting feeling and mental reaction that’s closer to “impact” than any other clichéd word I can come up with right now.��Value��is social—what does this art work mean to society on the whole, from a hundred-year viewpoint—whereas��price��is individual and semi-impulse driven.

Let’s make a bold, disputed, ignorant statement: Nonprofit presses traffic in��value��because they care about the future of society; corporate presses traffic in��price��to make sure they make maximum profit year by year by year.

Sales(S)

—Chad W. Post, “An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing“

The weather reports were wrong:

—The Nocilla Experience

Here’s a question to ponder in 2019, after this series of posts is completely over and I’ve moved on to pastures happier or more classic or less��this��whatever��this��might be: Is publishing a zero-sum game or not?

The initial (correct?) impulse is that it’s most definitely��not. If all publishers reach more and more readers every year, there’s no reason to believe that the number of book readers has an upper limit.��But does that really track? According to , between 2013-2017 adult fiction only had one year of growth (2015), and was down 1.2% between 2016 and 2017. That’s not a great sign.

This concept of an upper-limit on potential book sales is further complicated by the fact that there’s only so much shelf space in the country. Sure,��everything��is available through Amazon, but only X thousands of units will be displayed/showcased at the nation’s bookstores. And approximately 70% of those units all originate from a single company—Penguin Random House.

Put those facts together, and it starts to feel like there are real strong limitations on how many books will be sold in a given year, setting up a faux zero-sum situation in which more sales of book X will reduce the sales of books Y and Z. And when Open Letter is competing against PRH for readers and dollars, we’re basically never going to win. We don’t have the resources or the reputation, the connections or the influence. It’s simply not true that the “best books rise to the top.” At least not in terms of��sales.��

But are sales really the best way to evaluate a book’s success?

That said, are “best book” lists really that much better? How objective and valuable are these when Penguin Random House has 7 of the 10 “best books of 2018” according to the��New York Times? That’s like the��Wall Street Journal��running this headline: “The Best Indie Booksellers of 2018 Are AMAZON.COM!!!!”

Congratulations to our fiction and nonfiction books that made the top 10 Best Books of 2018 by The Times Book Review!

— Penguin Random House (@penguinrandom)

Sure, I don’t care about coastal elites or book lists either, but I’m sure that this list is more signal than noise to the average book buyer. If you only read a handful of titles a year, and these books are both displayed everywhere and showing up on lists like these,��why��wouldn’t you just buy one of the most popular, “best” books?

If you take a game that should be infinite and restrict the choices that one has access to—either directly, in terms of what’s readily available, or through influence over perceptions of readers—the game starts to imitate a zero-sum situation in which shelf space is premium ���Ի���value��is tied to “buzz” and there are only 12 books at any given time that any part of society will bother talking about.

It strikes me that worldwide reading statistics are wrong: there’s all the writing on the side of the packaging and wrappers to take into account.

—The Nocilla Lab

It’ll be interesting to see how��“The Nocilla Trilogy” is received. This is an unprovable statement, but I’m willing to bet that bookstores, critics, and readers all react to it much more favorably than they would have if it had been published by a small, translation-centric press like Open Letter or Deep Vellum or Dalkey or whomever. Coming from one of those presses, it would be seen as “too experimental,” “confusing,” “overly wordy,” “a bit precious and pretentious, like modern art.” The comp titles would’ve been other “innovative” books from presses with a marketing budget of “ha!” (The one comp title there is for “The Nocilla Trilogy” is��2666. Of course. A book that no Open Letter title can ever be compared to, since sales aren’t about quality and content, but about past results and money. These are the numbers I����Dz�’����like to run.)

All this is simplistic and widely known, and might not matter as much if we had some way to talk about a book’s��value��rather than its sales. A WAR for literature. “The Invented Part earned 5.5 Books Above Replacement in its first year in circulation.” “Although��Purity��had a very notable wSAA+ (weighted sales above average), it’s impactfulness was a negative 12, resulting in only 1.0 BAR for the year.”

I’ve mentioned in passing—maybe in a post, definitely to a few people in real life—that there was an overarching scheme to this year of post writing. That’s not a lie! Unlike so many other projects I’ve started, there really was an intent to finish this one. But there are so few weeks left in the year . . . so many books I’d like to read just for fun instead of for some quixotic attempt to define something about the publishing industry and the role of international literature, small presses, egos and strong personalities, anti-capitalist sentiments, and bad jokes.

So I’m going to cheat a little bit.

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The best thing about having sales conference in Minneapolis is being able to visit a number of spectacular bookstores. Milkweed is solid, Subtext is both cozy and incredibly well stocked, and Moon Palace 3.0 is bookstore paradise. (Seriously: bar/restaurant + performance space for indie rock and punk bands + gigantic bookstore with multiple levels. I AM IN LOVE AND NEED ONE HERE IN ROCHESTER. FRANCHISE ME, MOON PALACE.)

Anyway, at one of these stores I saw��Cat Person��for the first time.

Well, it’s not actually called��“Cat Person,” is it? It’s actually��You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories—a title that’s part ironic, part a reminder that there was a moment when the world gave fucks about short stories, and 120% unwieldy.

In keeping with the oddness of the title, the galley is a bit of a mess. Over top of the��actual c�DZ������is a black cover with “Cat Person” cut out on it, making it seem—once again—that��that��is the actual title.

Whatever, that’s not the point.

What caught our attention was the note from the publicist that was inside. It went something like this:

“Dear XXXX—

I’m 60% sure that I already sent this to you, but I KNOW you want it! So here’s another copy just in case. We’re REALLY excited about this collection!”

Have you��ever, in your life��heard someone say they were “60% sure” of having done something? Out of context, that sounds psychotic. “I’m 50% sure I locked the door.”��Fine. “I’m 90% sure I paid that bill.”��Probably not true, but fine.��“I’m almost positive I forgot my child at home.”��Not good, but I understand where you’re coming from.��“I’m 60% sure I ate lunch.”��WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM.

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Then again . . . why���Դdz���60%? It’s the numerical equivalent of “trying.”��I kinda did some work today. I gave it a good ol’ 60% effort.��Maybe 60% is the most efficient way to live . . . Baseball is great for about 60% of every game. My posts would garner more readers if they were only 60% as long as they usually are.

So I’m going to embrace my inner 60% and wrap up a ton of threads . . . mostly.

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Remember “My Struggle, Part I: Confusion and Value“? Me neither. But there was a lot of stuff in there about Knausgaard, caring about one’s readers, and about not being into Llansol’s��Geography of Rebels��trilogy, but withholding judgement until someone smarter came along and gave it a glowing review. You know, sort of .

Llansol’s writings, though, also illustrate the dangers of abolishing the structure of the traditional novel. In a novel, the reader—and she did always have at least some readers, especially after her return to Portugal—needs some way of knowing where he or she is, of knowing who is talking, of understanding why this story is being told, if any story is being told: if, that is, this is a novel at all. But the longer one inhabits Llansol’s world, the more one sees what it might mean to write��against the novel, to create prose that could aspire to the status of a living being, one that moves and exists without having some artificial form imposed upon it. [. . .]

And so it is not for plot or character that we read Maria Gabriela Llansol. It is for the source of energy that her books contain. Open them to any page, like a volume of poetry; and listen to these dead people speaking.

To be fair, I did make it through about 60% of this book, and get what Ben’s saying, and, well, 60% is enough of a percent for me.

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It took massive hardcovers, ebook versions (my weak wrists!), and several audiobooks, but I conquered! It’s also sweetly ironic that Amazon is trying to sell me Grisham’s��The Reckoning.��Maybe that should be the next Two Month Review book . . . “Welcome to the Two Month Review where we concuss ourselves through boring words week after BLAM! . . . Brian? Uh, Bri— Oh, never mind, that was just the CTE setting in . . . permanently.”

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In that same post mentioned above, I alluded to notes I had for “part II.” This is also true! But rather than try and write that whole post—it was going to be��long and include a semi-logical step-by-step progression from the “unreadable” to the��unreadable, from the hard to read to the��do not read—let’s just get to it’s core 60%!

The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.

The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. [. . .]

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.��[. . .]

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.��[. . .]

What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as “good”?

We would only shake our heads.

Exactly the same applies to political advertising.

This is upsetting for so many reasons. First of all, if you replace “propaganda” with “public relations,” you might believe you’re reading something by Edward Bernays. Few more tweaks and this wouldn’t seem out of place in a business class on marketing.

But it’s not. It’s by Hitler. From��Mein Kampf. Which, same as all of you, I would never ever ever have read a word of—we’re not monsters!—had Knausgaard not put it inside of this last volume of��My Struggle.��

This is one of the��least��disturbing parts of��Mein Kampf��that he quotes.

Adding to the horror of realizing what this is the fact that Knausgaard analyzes it, breaks down the way in which the book ignores an “I” in favor of an “us” and a “we” in order to make a “them.” He points out how it’s impossible not to treat this as the document responsible for one of the worst events in the history of mankind, how history prevents us from seeing Hitler as anything other than a monster. And that’s fascinating when you start to think about it in relation to contemporary texts, books, tweets.

There’s the trope about going back in time to kill Hitler, but one of the things that comes clear in Knausgaard’s account of his life and writing is that,��within the context of his time, Hitler wasn’t yet Hitler. It’s a truism that we all totally know, but one that will forever be impossible to fully comprehend.��How didn’t the people of Germany know that they were in the midst of one of the most evil human beings ever?

The rest of my post was going to include: an anecdote about finding a Don Mattingly rookie card and puzzling over how I didn’t know that this would be valuable right from the start, since the name “Don Mattingly” has a ring of success to it; about what values there are/are not in reading things that everyone says are horrible or trash or offensive or wrong or whatever in order to see them for what they are; about aesthetic prejudices (see really offensive Grisham joke above) and political beliefs and filter bubbles and the desire to only read what you feel like you’ve already read.

Imagine the amazingness of the 60% of that article I didn’t ever write! I was on��fire��with those notes, jokes, and observations.

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Let’s get to the whale! I mean, let’s get to the 60%!

So, here is what I wrote in my phone last January when I decided to try and read a translation+ a week and write about them here:

Don’t ever really write about the book. Or if you do, try and find some weird way—stats, high concept, stupid detail—to connect it to a larger book culture issue. Spend nine or ten months hammering away at how fucked everything is: sales, book coverage, how we value books, how mixed up publishers are about their missions and goals and why they even do this. Be bleak, but be funny. Offend people because otherwise no one will pay attention. Then, through the lens of what nonprofits are—silly to the average reader, crucial in the industry, undervalued by the rich—turn your back on everything and question the very concept of artistic value. What makes a painting valuable is one fool willing to pay for it. What makes a book valuable is a lot of fools willing to take it into their brains. At that point, you should fuck numbers. It’s like a double-heel turn. Make up sabermetrics for publishing.

I’m 60% sure that was written after my second Buffalo Trace, but I’m only 60% sure because I’m maybe psychotic and my memory is shit.

Regardless, that plan is like 60% of the way there! I got derailed on the nonprofit stuff because I read the comments/had a conversation with someone smarter and kinder than me which helped me see the error of my initial approach. And then Prozac happened and things got shiny.

But I am concerned about the future of nonprofits. Not Graywolf and Coffee House and Copper Canyon—they won! They hit the levels you need to hit to live, if not forever, until the world ends in 12 years.

If I told you, “hey, there are three-four major publishers that account for, like, 60% of all sales and funding, because they already have the budgets to support the necessary level of staffing and advances to grab the books that grab that market and lock it down through Winter Institute parties and whatnot,” would you feel good about that?

We need a diversity of presses, but, at the rate things are going, I’m not super optimistic. Everyone who’s not in NYC or Minneapolis seems very at sea. Most nonprofits are obsessed with equating sales with success with readers. Books are just an object to sell or to be funded. There is no third dimension–it’s a very linear graph in which “importance” and “number of Amazon purchases” have a 1:1 ratio. That’s wrong. But then again, a lot of these successful nonprofits have 30+ years of heavy funding to work through staffing situations, the reality that the smartest editors will ALWAYS lose their best authors if they don’t work for a multi-million dollar company.

Then again, there just aren’t national funders for nonprofit book publishers. Outside of a handful of small presses with local donors, we’re all fucked. There is no national donor to nonprofit literature anymore. There was Lannan. There is Minneapolis—if you’re based there. There’s nothing else. And to say, “cultivate your own donors!” is cute, until you realize that most of all the nonprofits exist in areas in which the��literary nonprofit��narrative��doesn’t exist.��It’s so much easier to fund a theater space, or philharmonic, or art gallery—which is why the “Rochester Arts Council” (#fakenews) never contacted anyone from the literary arts to be involved with their failed “region-wide funding” attempts (nope, you don’t count, Writers & Books! You are about self-publishing and self-exploration through writing—which, great! I do it every week!—but not “literature” in this present sense of the word).

*

Fuck it. That’s 60% enough. I tried. And I still have six more weeks of essays to write.

Because my outline for this Deep Vellum post is approximate 17,000 words long, I’m going to condense my planned opening into eight bullet points. If you’re not familiar with the Oulipo or their literary program, here’s a quick-hitting introduction:

1. ��or the��;
2. According to Wikipedia—the world’s favorite reference source—the Oulipo is “a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers ���Ի���mathematicians who seek to create works using����techniques.”;
3. Constraints are predetermined rules that the writer has to abide by, things like the “prisoner’s dilemma” (no letters that have a tail or a stem can be used, so no “t” or “p”), a lipogram (elimination of a particular letter or letters, such as Perec’s��A Void, which lacks the letter “e”), or something like n+7 in which every noun in a piece is replaced by the seventh following noun in the dictionary;
4. There’s also this book by one of the youngest members of the Oulipo, who was also a guest on the Three Percent Podcast��(which I called “A Gin & Tonic Does NOT Make Me a Better Oulipian” for reasons left to history and a blurry past);
5. Check out the “inner circle” of Oulipian writers and books:��Life a User’s Manual��by Georges Perec (so many constraints! starting with the “knight’s tour” and a cutaway of an apartment building), all of Raymond Queneau but also especially��Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,��Harry Mathews’s��Cigarettes��(I still haven’t processed Harry’s passing, and can’t bring myself to read his last book yet because I avoid grief and ideas of death at all costs; and yes, I did get really drunk with him once and asked him to tell me what the secret was behind “Mathews’s Algorithm” and he laughed), and If on a winter’s night a traveler . . .��by Italo Calvino, and The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud;
6. Oulipians are “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”;
7. Look into the back catalog of Dalkey Archive Press (Jacques Jouet!!) and/or��Deep Vellum for more recent additions to the Oulipo, including, in the case of DV, the first Spanish and Argentine members, about whom I’m about to say things.

��by Pablo Martín Sánchez, translated from the Spanish by Jeff Diteman (Deep Vellum)��

Quick Summary: This is a novel about the anarchist Pablo Martín Sánchez, who c��after being arrested for trying to invade Spain in 1924 and ignite the revolution against Miguel Primo de Rivera. The��author��Pablo Martín Sánchez discovered the “anarchist with the same name” by accident and, according to his prologue at least, researched the shit out of the anarchist and pieced together this 580+ page depiction of his life.

Oulipian Constraints: Nothing stood out to me. Sure, there are two alternating threads to this novel—one starts in 1924 and goes through the “incursion” into Spain and Martín Sánchez’s death; the other tells the story of Pablo’s life from birth through 1924, eventually overlapping with the opening to the novel and its “present tense” narrative. It’s almost a sort of Möbius Strip, although not exactly, and not to the level of complexity of Cortázar’s��Hopscotch.��There has been a debate among members of the Oulipo as to whether the constraints they use to construct their fictions should be made evident in the course of reading the book itself (see:��A Void), or should be invisible, like scaffolding that helped in the construction of a structure—a structure that now stands by itself with no need for scaffolding at all. Although there’s a fun, speculative ending to the book that semi-usurps the previous 500+ pages, this isn’t explicitly Oulipian, except insofar that��Martín Sánchez is part of the Oulipo, thereby making everything he writes “Oulipian” in at least one sense, since the Oulipo is first and foremost a writing group.

Martín Sánchez’s Oulipian Pedigree: From via Google Translate (all errors and spacing issues exactly as from Google Translate): “in Spain, he co-founded the journal Ludolinguistics���ձ����������à��������, sponsored by the oplpian Màrius Serra, and began preparing a doctoral thesis entitled��The Art of Combining Fragments: Hypertextual Practices in Oulipian Literature (Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino , Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud)he will finish a few years later at the University of Lille, under the co-direction of Christelle Reggiani. [. . .]��He has been working since 2002 on a project called��The Project��(��El Proyecto), inspired by the��Places��of Georges Perec, which should end in 2026.”��He’s also translated both Alfred Jarry and Raymond Queneau into Spanish and was officially elected into the Oulipo in 2014 as the first member from Spain. New-lipian! Viva la España!

Other Thoughts?: This is fun to read! Sure, it’s looooonnnggg, but aside from a few middle sections where the alternating narrative chapter structure forces the book to drag a bit, it reads faster than you’d expect, and has the same compelling sort of plot-driven narrative as a great Dickens novel. Also, there are anarchists and revolution and when are those things not fun to read about? All historical names and contexts are explained in non-pedantic ways that give the average reader all the necessary information re: Spain pre-World War II.

��by Eduardo Berti, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Coombe (Deep Vellum)

Quick Summary: A Chinese girl growing up in the 1920s and 30s meets another girl, Xiaomei, who she thinks is just the most beautiful, amazing girl in the world. They become friends and develop a touching relationship that is disrupted by the arranged marriages of the narrator and her brother. (Who she was trying to set up with Xiaomei.) It’s a small novel that captures that moment in which you leave adolescence and when things can still feel monumental in a very hopeful, open-eyed way.

Oulipian Constraints: Again, I might be missing something. It’s a nicely constructed book with interstitial sections of the narrator talking to her dead grandmother in her dreams, but it’s not explicitly “Oulipian” in a Queneau/Roubaud/Perec sense. I think all twenty-six letters appear.

Eduardo Berti’s Oulipian Pedigree: Will’s bio on Deep Vellum’s site is fine, but this one is way more fun to parse (again, all errors are [sic]): “Eduardo Berti has been a member of the Oulipo since June 2014. Born in Argentina in 1964, a Spanish-speaking writer, he is the author of several short stories, a book of small prose and several novels.��Translator and cultural journalist, it is translated into seven languages, in particular in French language where one can find almost all his work [. . .]��not to mention two texts difficult to classify:��Small Mirrors�����Ի���Retrospective Bernabé Lofuedo .” First Argentine member of the Oulipo! Viva L����Albiceleste!

Other Thoughts?: This is the sort of book that I usually don’t read—really straightforward, rather emotional, mostly plot-driven—but that I greatly enjoyed. Charlotte Coombe is a translator I recently became aware of via her translations for Charco Press (soooo jealous of their covers), but this is the first one I’ve read. I liked it! There were one or two word choices that stood out—always in occasions when I remembered this was set in 1920s China—but otherwise the voice is really consistent and compelling. The one thing that troubled me—and which I’m not sure how to explain in a way that’s both “yay��The Imagined Part!” and “yeah, I’m woke!”—is the potential trouble of an Argentine male writer depicting the life of a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl from almost one hundred years ago. There is a proliferation of superstitions and rituals and beliefs and traditions (like taking pet birds to nature to keep them singing, about not getting married within two years of a major family death, etc.) in this book that, if they’re not part of a larger Oulipian constraint/construct, raise some issues about whether they’re in the stereotyping or cultural appropriation side of things, or an accurate historical representation. I’m not sure how this will play with critics, but I hope people read the book either way. It sort of doesn’t matter that it’s a Chinese girl at the heart of the novel—the heart of the book is the tender descriptions of the relationship between the two girls. Sure, if you set this in Argentina, it would diminish the “cultural exploration” aspect of reading a translation, yet wouldn’t actually matter that much. In an alternate-reality Argentina, there are arranged marriages and people grow up and apart. That’s still sad and something every human can relate to. Still. I won’t be surprised to read a critique of this book from that particular perspective. There’s a lot more to mine than I’m capable of unpacking.

*

In honor of the Oulipo—and these two titles being the fourth and fifth Oulipian books Deep Vellum has published—I thought I would do my own P+7 Oulipian experiment. Listed below are the seventh books (as listed in the ) published by a variety of small presses. What does this say about the presses? No idea. Nothing, probably.

��by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Deep Vellum)

YES! Great start to my LitHub + Oulipo list! Pitol is a cornerstone of Deep Vellum’s list, having published Pitol’s incredibly influential “Trilogy of Memory” with a short story collection () forthcoming. Also, George Henson hates��Two and a Half Men, which is, without exaggeration, one of the worst sit-coms ever made in the history of television. Fuck you, CBS.

��by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchinson (Open Letter)

Not what I was hoping for! But, that said, we almost did this at Dalkey—the first third is fucking incredible—Deep Vellum did a different Pfeijffer book, there’s a story about how Pfeijffer posed naked for an author photo because he said that was the only way to get people to buy a book of poetry, and Michele is a really good person and translator.

��by Maria Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Transit Books)

I remember Adam and Ashley pitching this at last sales conference, and given the highlights—nonfiction, Spanish, Katie Silver, Transit—I’m shocked that I haven’t thought about this since. Given the overwhelming popularity of Transit titles, I half-expect a bookseller (hello, Sparks, this is so much your jam) to be raving about this on Twitter next time I open the app . . .

Proposed riverside theater site part of $250M high-rise hotel and retail complex

— Democrat & Chronicle (@DandC)

Oh! The most recent Tweet on my timeline is about Rochester’s Parcel 5! That’s sooooo surprising!I hope they open the world’s largest Abbott’s there and create a custard-cream swimming hole in the middle of Rochester’s most famous parking lot.

��by Marek Hlasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz (New Vessel)

Perfect. This is a classic NV author. Just look at this dude!

Also, I have to say, this is saved on the NV website under “Ufberg-image.” I LOVE YOU ROSS. In a different reality—where I don’t waste my nights watching rich baseball teams approximate regular season baseball for nineteen hours a night—Ross looks just like Marek. NO! CHECK THAT! Ross��lives��Marek’s life.

“Marek Hlasko, known as the Polish James Dean, made his literary debut in 1956 with a short story collection. Born in 1934, Hlasko was a representative of the first generation to come of age after World War II, and he was known for his brutal prose style and his unflinching eye toward his surroundings. In 1956, Hlasko went to France; while there, he fell out of favor with the Polish communist authorities, and was given a choice of returning home and renouncing some of his work, or staying abroad forever. He chose the latter, and spent the next decade living and writing in many countries, from France to West Germany to the United States to Israel. Hlasko died in 1969 of a fatal mixture of alcohol and sleeping pills in Wiesbaden, West Germany, preparing for another sojourn in Israel.”

I’m pretty sure Ross told me a story once about how Hlasko was living in L.A. to make a movie of one of his books, but then punched out the director and quit the project. That’s a thing.

Buy New Vessel books. Please. Just do it.

��by Rusalka Reh, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire (AmazonCrossing)��

Katy Derbyshire was the first ever Three Percent fan I ever met. I can’t remember the name of the conference I was at, but it was in London and during one of the events I sat next to A. S. Byatt’s daughter (also named Antonia? She was maybe the head of PEN England back like a decade ago? My memory . . .). Anyway, after the event ended, a pleasant young woman came up to me—with her mother—and asked if I was “the” Chad Post.

Katy is a wonderful translator and, despite all of her work, feels really underappreciated in a general sense. We should all go buy one of her translations this week—either the one mentioned above or one of the nine she’s done for Seagull Books—and support someone who does quality work but doesn’t try and push into (or accept being pushed into) the spotlight all the time.

The Game for Real��by Richard Weiner, translated from the Czech by Benjamin Paloff (Two Lines)

Two Lines has a great look to their books.��(gibbons)��Their covers are both classy and of the moment.��(gibbons)��They have Ben Paloff—who mostly (?) translates from Polish—working for them.��(gibbons)��They do things that are too edgy for the National Book Award (BADGE OF FUCKING HONOR), yet strike ����(gibbons)��chord with a lot of readers. Two Lines is a place of experimentation��(gibbons)��and trendy��(gibbons).��

Sorry, Michael, I can’t keep our in-j0ke going! I love you all, and hope you gibbons a gibbon gibbons for gibbons gib gibbonish gibbonsy gibbons gibbon. XOXOXOX

Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry,��edited by��Víctor Terán and David Shook and translated by people (Phoneme Media)

I’m 99% sure no one is reading these words. Given that, I want to say two things: 1) the fact that the seventh Phoneme book is about indigenous poetry is the best coincidence given David Shook’s interest, intent, and amazingness and 2) we’re co-hosting an Indie Press Night in L.A. on 11/4 with Unnamed (Phoneme’s sister press). Again, assuming no one—especially not in the L.A. region—is reading this, I feel super comfortable offering a space at the Prosecco and appetizer and free indie press book night to the next four people who email me. I’ll be SHOCKED if anyone contacts me. Also: BUY THIS BOOK. PHONEME ROCKS.

Like with most of the books I’ve been reading of late, I knew basically nothing about this book before picking it up. (And picking it up for a silly linguistic connection between one book’s topic and another’s title. Make reading serendipitous again? NO MORE.) Even if I had, I’m not sure what I would’ve gleaned from this:

Throughout the three novels in the Geography of Rebels trilogy, historical figures such as Ana de Peñalosa, Friedrich Nietzsche, Saint John of the Cross, and Thomas Müntzer cross time and spatial barriers to become vehicles for a reality that only exists within the mind, exploring freedom of narrative and language in a literary universe of Llansol’s own creation. Life and death become interwoven in a web of words as the boundaries of history and identity unravel.

(Does everyone but me know who Ana de Peñalosa and Thomas Müntzer are?)

There’s a dual-purpose to jacket copy: on the one hand, it should work in concert with blurbs, cover image, and other metatextual elements to entice potential readers; on the other, it should provide readers with certain guideposts to approaching the work—especially if it’s on the experimental end of things.

Which is exactly where��this trilogy resides.

Here’s the opening paragraph to��The Book of Communities:

Place 1—

in that place there was a woman who did not want to have children from her womb. She asked the men to bring her their wives’ children so she could educate them in a large house with only one room and only one window; she wore a black shawl close to her face; she had a distant way of making love: with her eyes and with her speech. Also with time, for since the days of her great-grandmother, going back to any era was always possible. Moving, she sometimes looked intently at a place�� �� �� �� �� the most beautiful in her house�� �� �� �� the whole house

A few pages later on:

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� we three wrote leaning against the railing, dying on our feet, not knowing whose mouth articulated what we said. Saint John of the Cross, fearful to suddenly begin levitating, leave our company, and, not least, become ridiculous because at that time all my lovers walked in the oratory, or rather, the great entrance to the garden.

I’m not even mentioning the innovative layouts that pop up in the first thirty pages—the breaking of the text into two columns, the insertion of a two-column text in a different sized font in the middle of a paragraph, etc.

Here’s the main point: I read the first thirty pages of this book last night and had no idea what I was reading. I like to brag to myself that I’m totally into complicated, confusing, experimental books, but after that first bit of��Geographies��I was wondering what the point of reading this was, since I wasn’t getting anything out of it.

Which is a question that comes up with regard to any number of “difficult” classics:��why bother? Is there any point to making me work so hard to understand this? There’s nothing to grasp onto! Where is Jack Ryan?

A couple years ago, my friend Vince Francone decided to read��Finnegans Wake��over the course of twelve (or so) months, and I decided to join him and read along. There is no book in the English language that is more complicated to get into than��Finnegans Wake. Full stop. By comparison,��Geography of Rebels��is like a Dick and Jane primer.

There is one crucial difference though: There exist, in English, numerous guides or studies of��Finnegans Wake��that help to open it up to new readers and, more importantly, make arguments about its overall value.

Whenever you’re struggling with a really challenging book—be it challenging for linguistic, structural, or stylistic reasons—there comes that moment when you have to decide whether the payoff is worth the effort. Am I going to get enough out of��Geography of Rebels��that I should spend a couple hours a night wading through its ambiguous, layered, abstracted prose?��

There’s a larger question that’s best left untouched hiding in this: what do we get out of reading fiction in general that makes it worth our while? But whereas one can dance around that when you’re talking about a thriller (it’s for entertainment!), it’s a trickier question when we’re talking about a book that’s seemingly lacking in both characters and plot.

Thankfully, there’s an introduction from Gonçalo M. Tavares that should shed some light on the “why read Llansol” question.

This is also about sudden illuminations infiltrating what seemed to be a sleeping beauty-sentence. A kiss that awakens the sleeping beauty, that causes it to leap up; not a quiet awakening, but a leap forward, leap upon leap, an excessive leap, beyond the limits of the leap—a leap forward. Thus Llansol’s text. At times we seem to be in the calm, expected sea, and then suddenly, those sentences that make us stop, that demand we read with a pencil, underline, salvage the sentence from that place, from the book, carrying it to the everyday, to reality.

“telling them that, with such cold weather, those sitting in the middle of the horses’ blood would win” (The Book of Communities)

Sure! I guess?

So what to do? Thirty pages in, I understand nothing of this book and am not particularly enjoying that sensation. At the same time, I feel like this is��exactly��the sort of challenge that I should be championing—one that fits the sort of anti-realistic aesthetic that I want to promote. And it feels lame to give up so easily, a few dozen pages into only the second Deep Vellum book I wanted to tackle for the month.

Going back to the cover for a moment. There are four blurbs on here. One from Eduardo Lourenço (?) about how “Llansol will be the next great Portuguese literary myth, alongside Pessoa himself.” One from the��TLS��referencing how Llansol is “one of the most fascinating Portuguese writers of the twentieth century.” A bit from Ben Moser’s afterward comparing her to Clarice Lispector, and one from Tyler Malone that I’ll quote in full:

Imagine Clarice Lispector speaking with specters. Imagine Emily Dickinson seeking and finding a community. Imagine Hilda Hilst rebelling further into the madding crowd. Imagine Virginia Woolf as a Lisbon-born medium channeling displaced waves of consciousness. Imagine Fernando Pessoa as a woman building edenic spaces outside of our time-space continuum.

I love Virginia Woolf, respect Lispector, dig Hilst, and am currently reading Pessoa for the��Two Month Review��(and have loved him for more than a decade). Given that, I think I have to keep reading. If this book is being placed in that company—by a reader I know and admire—then there must be��something��there that I’m missing. But how will I find what I’m missing?

*

Geography of Rebels��gathers three short books by the Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol [. . .] In��The��Book of Communities,��The Remaining Life�����Ի���In the House of July and August, fragment flows into fragment with a marked disinterest in any conventional plot that might guide the reader, yet a common tone binds the three works. Names recur, most notably that of Ana de Peñalosa, along with those of several famous, mostly German, mystics from the past. As this group goes on walks, talks, observes the surroundings and writes, Llansol inhabits one mind after another, constantly shifting the view.

The experience is that of reading a kind of poetry, in which the primary objective is not necessarily clarity of content, but rather the production of a certain emotional state. The text itself often splits into a visual poetry of columns, staggers into fragments ragged in unusual ways, and dissolves from solid paragraphs into sections cut by line breaks. The writings, grouped under various quirky titles, read as if they come from a set of personal notebooks, and could extend forever; [. . .]

The above is from Jessica Sequeira’s review of��Geography of Rebels��for the website. Aside from in full—the same one referenced above and quoted on the jacket copy—Sequeira’s is the longest piece about this book that I could find online. And although it echoes the jacket copy in part, it also provides a viewpoint for how to approach this book—as poetry producing an emotional state, rather than as a narrative constructing a plot, or an amorphous character study.

Much like jacket copy, book reviews function in a few ways simultaneously. The worst are simply advertisements, such as the infamous “best books of X” lists that I’ve pilloried here for years, or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, self-indulgent attempts to show off the reviewer’s erudition and fine-tuned way of expressing their opinions about books. Both of those options leave most informed readers rather disappointed. A review could be a straight recap of the plot, devoid of stylistic criticism or a strong opinion on the part of the reviewer; or they could consist entirely of the reviewer’s assessment of the writer’s ability to��write, whatever that means to the reviewers. (Some prefer winding Jamesian sentences that aspire to be desconstructed by a middle-aged grammar school English teacher; others value pace and motion, a plaintive prose that is more evocative than cerebral.) Regardless of the approach, the standard review passes a judgement on the book—is this worth reading?

At the same time, whether the review praises the book or not, it provides an approach��to the book. A��take��on what the author is playing at over all these pages, all these words. Whether or not it succeeds, the vast majority of books are at least��trying��to do something. Maybe they just want to entertain, or the book wants to convey a specific idea, series��of ideas, high concept premise that blows the reader’s mind. Maybe it’s a delicate structural game, or an emotionally manipulative novel that’s meant to leave you in tears.

Or, as in most cases, it’s a number of these things. Which is what gives the critic license to provide a specific take.��This stood out to me. The author was trying to do Y, but X got in the way. More of Z would’ve made B an A.��The best reviews present an approach to the book. A reader of the review—or blog post, or Goodreads comment, or podcast, or Twitter opinion—comes away with a bit of knowledge that will give them a “head start” when going into a book.

It’s up to the reader to accept or reject this particular reading, but at least it’s something to watch for, to hone in on. With a book like��Geography of Rebels, which in itself offers the reader��almost nothing��to grab on to, a smart review can make all the difference. Poetry. Tone. Emotion.

*

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� the text immersed in the horses’ blood tells of the adventure in the desert and how it liberated the mind from all spiritual imperfections and all earthly desires. It entered into that inner darkness where sensitive and invisible things can be penetrated through the snow, supported only by the ascent and ascending.

That is why I call it a stairway because its steps and articles are secret, hidden to all sensitivity and understanding. That is why he says he went in disguise.

Although��Sequeira pooh-poohs the comparison between the comparison between Llansol and Lispector that the marketing copy leans into (“beyond the common substratum of Portuguese, the two writers really are quite different”), those above paragraphs invoke the same sort of emotion that I get when reading the Lispector books that I have a hard time connecting with.��The Chandelier��comes to mind, although there are others. This sort of abstract prose that is based in allusion, in trying to articulate a miasmic, yet explorable inner sensibility leaves me cold in a way that Sarraute’s novels—arguably trying to accomplish the same affect—never do.

That has to be one of the most pretentious and shitty sentences I’ve written in these posts all year. I know it’s an attempt to raise myself up to Llansol’s the literary level which, like with Lispector’s, has received near universal praise.��I’m��the one who doesn’t get it, so in my response, the path of least resistance is to simply say “it pales in comparison to X, which is obviously superior, and which you hopefully haven’t heard of.” That sentence—that exact sentence—is the sort of thing that would lead me to tweet “fuck this review” and say dumb reactionary things on the next Three Percent Podcast.

Here’s the truth: I don’t get Geography of Rebels��and I enjoy trying to get it and I want to justify putting this book down and moving on. And all those feelings make me uncomfortable.

*

Most readers don’t care about reviews. Most readers have never read a Lit Hub list. Most readers can’t name five book critics whose taste is in line with theirs. Most readers don’t talk to booksellers. But that’s not true for any of you who are reading this. If you’re this deep into this neverending post (you should see the notes written out for the rest of this . . . and for part II), you know bookstores, book influencers, and names of specific publishers you follow. You are not the average reader. I am writing this for you.

That’s one point that I disagree with in terms of Sequeira’s review. She points out that Llansol “reads as more sincere, more genuinely absorbed in religion and historical mysticism, less interested in ‘hooking’ the reader or crafting infinite strategies to attract the reader to what she is saying,” which I 150% agree with, but she contrasts that with Lispector, and although I can see where she’s coming from, I think there are some Lispector titles that verge into this “reader-disinterested” realm.

What is the obligation of the writer to the reader, really? And vice-versa? What obligation do I, as someone who will never ever review a book for the��New York Times��or��New Yorker��or any other influential outfit, yet can not stop myself from writing these posts week after week under the possibly delusional idea that they have��some��impact, even if that impact is solely in making Kaija and Anthony laugh out loud? If I’m somewhat of an influencer within the sub-sub-sub-realm of international translated high-minded literature, do I have a responsibility to fully engage with��Geography of Rebels��before setting it aside? Does my expression of disinterest and confusion belittle this book unfairly? Possibly.

*

There are two other really smart reviews of this book online. Here’s a bit from the one at :

Through the use of imagery and the voices of the characters, she conveys the importance of these people in European intellectual life and history, while also conveying the role of community of women, the role of nature and a radical view of religion. It is a beautiful book, generally eschewing plot and other features of a conventional novel, which may make it challenging but very much worthwhile.

And from :

The magnificent heterotopia, constructed by the Portuguese author out of the debris of European history and culture, brings together Thomas Müntzer, the leader of the ill-fated peasant uprising during the early Reformation, St. John of the Cross, the Spanish Catholic mystic and poet whose masterpiece��Dark Night of the Soul��(La noche oscura del alma) narrates the peregrination of the soul on its way to the unity with God, and Friedrich Nietzsche, a rebel philosopher��par excellence. The real protagonist of this tripartite extravaganza, however, is the sensual and cerebral Ana de Peñalosa, the major driving force of the community of rebels. She is also a mystic, as well as an intellectual whose goal is to recreate some kind of transcendental space exclusively devoted to knowledge. Known today as just a marginal figure to whom St. John of the Cross dedicated the four stanzas of�� (Llama de amor viva),��Ana de Peñalosa takes centre stage in��Geography of Rebels��to tell her story and the story of a Europe torn between the Reformation and Counter-reformation in a unique and utterly absorbing manner, weaving a complex tapestry of allegories, symbols, allusions and revelations, which is likely to invite just as many interpretations and learned discussions as the poetic heritage of her more renowned admirer.

Both of those, but especially the latter, are intense in their specificity and ability to provide a baseline for what Llansol is, page-by-page, writing about. I eventually Googled Ana de Peñalosa and got to her connection with St. John of the Cross (different from Saint John of the New Testament for those following along at home), but that’s about it.

*

There’s a bit at the beginning of Macedonio Fernandez’s��The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) in which he talks about how to defeat “skip-around readers.” I’m paraphrasing here, but he dismisses modern readers who can’t focus on reading a book from start to finish, but jump around, getting a taste and pretending they understand the book fully. His attempt to “defeat” them is to disorder his book, to make it so nonlinear that when they skip around, they end up reading it in a completely linear fashion.

Trying to read Pessoa’s��The Book of Disquiet��in chronological order is a chore. This book is built for the skip-around reader, the person who skims. Spoiler alert: That’s how I ended up approaching the Llansol, and man, is it a better book if you just give the middle finger to the idea of page 2 coming after page 1.

Going back to Macedonio—Borges’s mentor, a true intellectual rebel—even as he was toying with his “skip-around” readers, he was addressing them. He was concerned with their experience. Even that joke quoted above is tongue-in-cheek:��Look, I know this is as confusing as fuck, but I did it on purpose because *wink* if you put the pieces together it’s really quite fun and fulfilling. I would argue that he can’t even make a joke about the non-linearity of the text and skip-around readers without having his “true” readers in mind.

I don’t think Llansol cares about her readers at all.

Which is a damning thing to say in 2018. In our moment of intersectionality, sensitivity readers, and identity-politics driven readings, it’s not acceptable to just say whatever, readers be damned like it once was. Sure, there’s a huge chasm between latent racism and Llansol’s ability to cerebral herself into an audience of one, but the impulse stems from a similar place—the cult of the genius. A societal belief in the artist as somehow “above” or “separate from” society, infallible given their creative gifts, implicitly granted license to say whatever they want because what they have to say with either change society’s thinking or change how we think about artistic possibilities can give rise to both beautiful and horrifying results.

Every reviewer who has ever put finger to keyboard knows that “self-indulgent” is the code word for books in which the author thinks they’re a genius, but doesn’t accomplish anything unique. Calling a book “self-indulgent” is akin to throwing it on a garbage fire in today’s world. Although we tolerate more self-indulgent, Kardashian-esque tweets in 2018 than we should ever have to suffer, the idea of writing for oneself, without being reined in, without being told what’s acceptable in terms of societal or aesthetic norms—it’s somehow horrifying. That’s the mark that every author strives to avoid.

Except Knausgaard. And maybe Llansol (R.I.P.).

There is a difference though: Knausgaard is self-indulgent to the extreme, yet always has the reader in mind; Llansol’s disinterest in the reader is what makes her writing so self-indulgent.

(That is another sentence construction so lazy and pathetic in its self-affirmation—”X is A to B; Y is B to A”—that I would tweet out a big ol’����to this entire post.��Eat shit, Post.)

I’m only a mere 81% of the way through��My Struggle: Volume Six��(making me 94% of the way through the entire sextet?), but there’s never been a moment in which I’m not aware that Knausgaard is aware of me as a “reader.” Most readers think he’s boring, and that’s fine, that’s an acceptable reading. (Conversely, the self-proclaimed intelligentsia think he’s a genius, which is equally off-mark in my opinion.) When Knausgaard is at his most “boring,” he’s also at his most manipulative. Pessoa’s heteronym, Vincent Guedes, insists upon his nature, upon his disengaging from life because life is “disquiet” and “suffering.” Knausgaard shows you boring to make you feel like he’s like you.

The most exciting thing I did today was walk my son to the coffee shop. He was in his stroller. He wouldn’t sleep like usual. He spent the entire time trying to grab everyone’s seats. I skipped around in��Geography of Rebels.��I tried reading aloud to him. “When she went in, it reminded her of a tower.” I wanted to think about the passive voice, but he wanted to go home. He has a cough and every cough feels like the worst cough when you’re a parent, even if you know, in that rational part of your brain, that the only survivors in the world are the kids who can survive colds. I took him home and along the way tried to think about how to write a book review about not writing a book review that would both undercut my own sense of self and make everyone agree with me.��Is writing just Scientology performed in different outlets?

That’s life. Exciting things aren’t always happening, Jonathan Franzen.

The block quote above is ironic, but in keeping with the Knausgaard version of self-indulgence—we’re all diurnal creatures, every once in a while we can drift off and have abstract, meaningful thoughts about life, death, relationships, progeny, and the influence of history.

I prefer being “bored” in fiction to being intentionally overwhelmed by��meaning.

*

But that might just be me?

What would happen if this weekend Keith Gessen or Garth Risk Hallberg wrote a review for the��New York Times��proclaiming that Geography of Rebels��was far superior to��Finnegans Wake? Would that change my opinion of Llansol’s “self-indulgence”?

Yes.

Simply that. Yes. I would assume I am more wrong and stupid than usual.

That’s all it takes. Someone I respect telling me I should like something.

How many steps removed is our late-capitalist moment from fascism?

Remove art from the conversation for a moment. How often are new gadgets purchased because they’re “cool”? Because “how could you live without them?”

This sort of thinking was eschewed in 1990s high school settings—see��Heathers��(and not the bullshit remake) and the advent of actual “alternative” music, such as��Nevermind—yet has resurfaced in subtle, yet incredibly powerful ways. But now we embrace the signifying art/objects/opinions that give us entrance to the tribe we most closely align with. We all know our own shibboleths and how to perform them.

I want your approval. If the Man Booker tells me this is the “best book,” it’s the best book. To so, so, so many people. It’s easier that way. One way to reduce the tension of living is to belong.

*

That might be the real secret behind the advent of Knausgaard in Norway and the world. Not fitting in, but in a way that was ultra-concerned about The Reader, fully imagined. The words and sentences are never��that��abstract, because you have to be able to feel what he feels. (See part II of this post to be horrified by that statement.) But no one else was doing this when he did it. He tried something risky and didn’t couch it in abstractions 1% of the 1% willing to read a book could figure out. When you pay attention to every second of your life, you realize how much time you just waste. We don’t see it, because we think our waste is actually a thing of value, but it rarely is. One aspect of Knausgaard’s approach is to unmask this. The writer isn’t brilliant every second of the day, especially not when picking out prawns and crackers.

Does a nonprofit press have to “fit in”? If a tastemaker—and no, I’m not one, but I can play one on my��blog—says a book is good or bad, is it actually good or bad? Probably not! The number of books that are elevated through singular opinions is��disturbing��to anyone who has read about behavioral economics and/or Hitler’s rise to power. (Quick clarification: See part II of this essay, which will be about Knausgaard’s reading of��Mein Kampf in��My Struggle: Volume Six. This book has taught me more about Hitler’s life than any history class I ever took,��which, I know, is on me, but it’s also proof that a book like��My Struggle can be��weirdly impactful when read at the right moment.) If something is anointed, it’s soooooo much harder to have an original opinion. That’s how power works.

If the��New York Times��tells me Geography of Rebels��is great? I’ll read it. But what about the thousand books a year they don’t get to, but are solidly good? And the 2-3 of those that are��brilliant? The��NYT��is barely more of an arbiter than I am when you get right down to it. AND THAT IS TERRIFYING TO ALL OF US. Two major ideas of twenty-first century thought about limitation of our brains are that a) you don’t know what you don’t know + what you know, and b) you “know” what you “know” because of unrecognized biases of the mind. Both of these destabilize the idea of “objective evaluation,” which is dangerous when used in manipulative (re: PR) ways.

Let’s apply that to the nonprofit publishing world for a second: If I’m a reader for a National Endowment of the Arts grant and I think that a press is publishing “sub-par work that doesn’t deserve taxpayer money,” I could,��theoretically, help get them defunded. That would—in a lot of instances—end that press’s existence. And why? Because��I, as a panelist/critic found a book self-indulgent or “bad”? (FYI: I have seen this happen. I can’t talk specifics, but there is a recording of me saying “fuck that!” in a government file, so I guess I can cross that off my bucket list.)

The world is a scary place. For the first time since Chernobyl, I feel like I’m more likely to die of non-natural, cultural-environmental causes than not. (Let’s all drink ourselves to death? WRONG ANSWER.) I feel like the democracy of Twitter, and “the Internet” before it, has consolidated in ways that play straight into the worst trends of today’s capitalist moment. I respect Pessoa’s personal pessimism, and yet question why we think everything he wrote is automatically “great.” (Underlining quotes to impress Twitter fans doesn’t impress me.)

This is why—and yes, we’re entering into the last phase of my 52-week plan for these posts with this statement—I believe non-profit presses represent an interesting substratum of 2018 diversity in publishing. They are publishing the unpopular books that need to exist to keep book culture interesting.

*

I’m certain other readers will approach��Geography of Rebels��and fall into its shifting images and evocative prose. The Pessoa-like quality of Llansol’s writing. And that’s great for them!

For me, I like complicated prose that’s less based in evaluating the self in spiritual ways, and more about cerebral games that you can figure out through close reading and logic. And with that said, it’s time to move over to the Oulipian offerings Deep Vellum is bringing out this month.

Back in the spring of 2012, Will Evans called me to see if he could spend a summer in Rochester learning about Open Letter, all with a goal to starting his own press. He had recently read����and was inspired by the bit in there about how instead of whining about how there aren’t enough translations, people should go out and start their own presses.

That might probably be terrible advice, but whatever! We need more people in the world with quixotic ideas that they will into existence!

The summer of 2012 was absolutely magical for me. We spent so much time watching Euro Cup games and breaking down every aspect of the publishing industry. We were basically inseparable the whole time—which is why Will Evans was “Bromance Will” after Will Vanderhyden, aka, “Willscosin”—and within no time, Will was charming everyone at the Frankfurt Book Fair and talking to Consortium about distributing Future Tense Deep Vellum.

I’m on Deep Vellum’s board, so I’ve seen some of Will’s growing pains first hand. But after a bit of a rough patch, everything seems to be getting back on track, both with the books (five! are coming out this fall) and with the Deep Vellum bookstore.

Now that there are��forty��Deep Vellum titles in the Translation Database, it seems like a good time to look at where Deep Vellum has been, what their publishing profile is, how they fit into the overall publishing and nonprofit landscape, their editorial leanings, and whatever else comes out of reading a bunch of books from a single press all in a row.

��by Ófeigur Sigurdsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Deep Vellum)

Yes, Iceland again!

There are a number of interesting things about this book: where it’s set (in the southeast of Iceland, not Reykjavik), the nested narrative (it’s a letter that the author received from Bernhardur Fingurbjörd recounting a letter that Dr. Lassi wrote about her treatment of him), the fact that it’s as funny as it is serious (long-standing complaint of mine about how most literary translations are void of humor), and it’s ecological concerns (becoming more and more of a trend, especially now that we have, gulp, like 12 years left before everything falls apart).

Here’s a quick summary of what the book is about: Bernhardur grows up in Austria, but becomes obsessed with Iceland thanks to��National Geographic��and the fact that, while traveling through Iceland, his mom was assaulted and his aunt murdered.

As a toponymist, he’s particularly interested in the Öræfi area, which used to be called Herad (meaning “The Province”) until the volcano erupted in the 1300s and destroyed everything. That’s why it was renamed Öræfi, or, “The Wasteland.” Bernhardur is interested in all the placenames and the stories they tell about the Icelanders.

The novel opens with him crawling out of the mountain, frostbitten and with a serious bite from some sort of renegade sheep. Dr. Lassi, a local vet, ends up saving his life by amputating his leg, buttocks, and cock and balls. (His “pecker” ends up in Iceland’s Phallological Museum.) She then gets his story and relates it all in a manic, all-over-the-place fashion:

What the hell is ����gusthlaup? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, I keep writing this damn word in the report, taking it from the accounts that stream in here, but I have no idea what a gusthlaup is! The interpreter replied that she didn’t know what gusthlaup meant. Get Hálfdán from Tvíker! Dr. Lassi ordered the interpreter, he’s down at the meeting, no, Hálfdán is the ornithologist . . . Sigurdur! Fetch me Sigurdur, or whichever of the brothers is the geologist? Just get any of them, they must all know the word, they’re so learned, these people, and it has to be clear in the narrative.

There’s a lot more to this book, including a surprise ending and the true story of the only murder ever to take place in that part of Iceland. But the unrelenting lightning quick pace of the voices is what really makes this book work. It’s a bit like a Bernhard novel (the protagonist is a direct reference to everyone’s favorite bitter Austrian), but not quite so dark or claustrophobic. (Which is an ironic thing to write given the ending.) In a way, it reminds me of��Tram 83��in its attention to voice and cadence.

Which brings me back out of talking about the book—go buy it! it’s worth reading—and into talking more about Deep Vellum’s history and what it is they’ve published.

One of the most noteworthy things about Deep Vellum is how many different countries they’ve published books from. The first forty titles are from twenty-one different countries. (Actually more than that if you count all the countries represented in��Banthology��separately.) That a really solid commitment to find books from around the��world.��

I don’t know the stories behind��all��of Will’s books, but I know that Mexico was a priority for him given the press’s physical location and current politics. And I know that most of the Korean books came out of a trip to Seoul that Will, Ross from New Vessel, and I went on a few winters ago.

And I believe that��Öræfi��came about when Will met Ófeigur in a while attending the Reykjavik Literary Festival, which Will was attending because he was publish Jón Gnarr’s trilogy. Soaking in a hot pot is how all publishing decisions should be made.

This balance is also worth noting. There’s been more and more attention paid to publishing women writers in translation, but it’s still pretty disproportionate. In the case of Deep Vellum though, they’ve published 20 books written by men, and 19 by women. (And one anthology.) That’s amazing! I know that this was always Will’s intent, and it’s admirable to see how well he’s stuck to this part of his mission.

More coming soon—including a super long post on Thursday . . .

*

��by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana (Dorothy)

Dorothy would be another great press to read a bunch of their books in a row to learn about their editorial vision and whatnot.

But for now, I just want to say that this book really lives up to the hype. A lot of booksellers were all over this during the summer when they received the galley, and it’s one of the fall titles I’ve been most looking forward to.

A highly stylized mystery, it’s about a detective’s attempt to find a woman who fled from her husband with another man, yet sends her husband a number of cryptic notes, raising the possibility that she wants to be found. The “mystery” takes a backseat both to the detective’s musings on love and how it can leave, her relationship with the translator she hires to help her, the strange occurrences in the snowy taiga, and the evocative, crystallized prose.

No one can really know why someone leaves their home, not even, or above all, the one that leaves. But why would anyone pursue someone who flees to the Taiga? The answers, in my case, were numerous: for money, of course. For an Adam’s apple that threatened to break the leathery skin of a man’s neck? For that as well. In order to have the opportunity to ask a woman, directly, while grabbing her by the right arm in a struggle that was nearly pointless and even less decent, why, what for? For that, that’s why. Also. In order to see her eyes, terrified. In order to sink into those eyes, an insect of the boreal forest. Something that stings or bites. A tiny warrior. When inside, to buzz. The question or complaint, to pierce: tell me why. Tell me where this passion comes from. What’s it made of. How or what.

You can read a longer excerpt . And equally interesting is this essay by Christina Rivera Garza on “” which was written to mark Stefan and Tara Tobler’s decision to publish only women writers for a complete year:

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, as new generations of women worldwide forcibly expose the cruel nature of the gender hierarchies (and binaries) that structure our daily lives, while many reject the possibility of being either physically disappeared or culturally erased, the decision to only publish women authors may appear unusual, but it is urgent. I am convinced that writing is a critical practice: true, bold, brave, formally adventurous writing should have the ability to change perceptions and experience; the disordering of the senses talked about by Rimbaud, inextricably linked with the disordering of everyday life as we know it. Producing unusualness, writing expands our sense of what is possible. Imaginable. Livable. Publishing women authors is not a minor component in this process. [. . .]

I agree with the Argentinian writer Josefina Ludmer in that I believe literature now exists in a cultural phase we can describe as post-autonomous. Literature’s cultural capital guaranteed its status as an autonomous field of inquiry and practice throughout the twentieth century. However, it had declined precipitously by the end of the millennium, changing too its sphere of influence and the accessibility of its resources. As Josefina Ludmer says, instead of discreet units wrapped in clearly delineated genres that presented themselves as imaginary worlds with a fragile connection to community, today’s writings “do not admit literary readings. That is to say, it does not matter whether they are literature or not. We don’t know either whether they are reality or fiction. They inscribe themselves locally and in everyday reality in order to ‘produce the present,’ and this is precisely their relevance.”

So let’s dig in, see where things are at, and then preview some October titles!

*

Yesterday I was talking with one of our translators (hi, Will!) about the ideal��month��in which to bring out a particular book. He was wondering if there were particular rules to this, similar to what Hollywood does for the Oscars. Like, do more fall titles end up on year-end lists? Is there an advantage to bringing out a book early in the year, when there aren’t a lot of options? Do June books sell better than December ones?

Although I suspect Random House marketing folks have rules of thumb—or maybe even hard data—for these questions, I personally don’t. (With one exception: We were talking about a book coming out in 2020, so we’re going to avoid the fall—and election season—like the plague.) But as I was going through October and November books that I wanted to read for these weekly columns, I got completely overwhelmed. I have seven books that I want to read this month (and three that I set aside), and a stack of maybe ten or eleven for November. And that’s coming off a September in which I didn’t get to two titles that I had hoped to read. Lots of books! Where were all of these in January when I started this probably-terrible idea of trying to write about a translation a week?

Right now, there are 4,451 fiction titles in the Translation Database. (Which I entered by hand! My god how do I not have carpal tunnel yet. These posts alone should’ve broken both my wrists.) The month in which the most have been published? OCTOBER!

Most new fiction translations published by month (% of all translations):

October: 467, 10.28%

September: 440, 9.69%

November: 438, 9.65%

. . .

February: 349, 7.69%

July: 318, 7.00%

December: 253, 5.57%

Assuming that there’re some underlying forces at work here that are logical and have been developed over time, it’s probably a good idea to stay away from December. Unless . . . by game theory standards, pubbing in December would basically guarantee inclusion on the LitHub and Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Words Without Borders “books to read this month” lists? Although assuming those lists lead to more than two sales but far less than one thousand, that might not make a December pub date for your lead title all that worthwhile.

(That said, there are few things that are more annoying than having your best book of the year come out a few weeks removed from the “critical darling” of the moment. As democratic as the Internet has made book discussion, there is still a very clear movement in culture to rally around a single book at a time, drowning out the conversation about most everything else coming out around that time. It’s like a power law of book conversation or something. [Note to self: Time to revisit that earlier post about a “sabermetrics for publishing.”])

*

What I’ve decided to do this October is to read all five Deep Vellum books coming out at this time:����by Ófeigur Sigurdsson,����by Brice Matthieussent,����by Eduardo Berti,����by Maria Gabriela Llansol, ���Ի�����by Pablo Martín Sánchez. Given that Will Evans is pumping out so many books in such a short time, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see what one can say about a press’s overall aesthetic by reading a bunch of their titles in a row. Besides, all of these sound good!

Out of the non-Deep Vellum titles coming out this month, here are the ones that I would most love to read:

��by Kim Sagwa, translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

��by Taeko Kono, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North

��by José Revueltas, translated from the Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson

��by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine

��by Alejandro Jodorowsky, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

��by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

��by Ersi Sotiropoulos, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

��by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

��by Masako Togawa, translated from the Japanese by Simon Grove

��by Samir Naqqash, translated from the Arabic by Sadok Masliyah

��by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (everyone needs some fluff once in an while!)

��by Leonid Yuzefovich, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

��by Alex Beer, translated from the German by Tim Mohr

Again, so many��interesting books coming out this month. And this doesn’t even include��, retranslated in full by Damion Searls—the book I really wanted to read this month until I realized it would probably break me. (And wouldn’t help with my BTBA predictions.)

Back to that game theory idea: October seems like a month in which your book can easily get buried.

*

I doubt any of you are here to learn about which months have the “most” or “fewest” translations. You want more global numbers!

OK, let me explain the visualization then bring in the bad news. In the chart above, the red line charts the number of works of fiction in translation for each year in the Translation Database, and the green line is a three-year rolling average of those numbers.

In other words, the 2016 point on the red line is 540–the highest number on record for works of fiction—but the 2016 point on the green line is 521.33—the average number of books published in 2014-16. The benefit to the green line is that it smoothes out huge jumps in either direction, eliminating outliers.

But see how both lines sort of dive down post-2016? That’s troubling.

2016: 540 titles

2017: 495, down 5.4%

2018: 428, down 13.5%

As I mentioned above, I don’t think 2018 is complete yet, though, so let’s just look at the numbers for publications from January through October.

2016: 457 titles

2017: 430, down 5.9%

2018: 378, down 12.1%

Uh-oh.

Later on this year, I intend to explain this by looking at how we evaluate “success” and the impact that all of the things I’ve been writing about for the past year have led to a critical time for the sub-section of the publishing world that’s involved with literature in translation.

But that’s for later. That’s a December break, snowed in with a fifth of whiskey sort of post.

Let’s look at some other things.

*

Of the 428 translated works of fiction I have logged in for 2018:

• 150, or 35%, were written in the original by women;
• 189, or 44%, were translated into English by women;
• Top translated languages are: French (65), Spanish (64), German (41), Italian (29), and Japanese (28);
• Publishers with the most fiction translations: AmazonCrossing (41), Dalkey Archive (18), New Directions (14), Europa Editions (13), and FSG (13).

Couple quick observations:

1. Spanish has almost caught French! For the sake of comparison, in 2017, 103 French works of fiction were published in translation, compared to 63 Spanish ones.
2. Look at that gap between AmazonCrossing ���Ի���everyone else. Dalkey Archive has published less than half��as many books in 2018 as AmazonCrossing?! Last year it was 55 vs 30 . . . There’s something to dig into in the combined 26 title drop off from the two presses, but, again, December break + whiskey.
3. The numbers for women in translation are improving (it was 22% in 2008), but still seem at least 8% too low.

*

I think that’s all for now. I feel like I’m short-changing this post by not including anything about the October titles I listed above, but am unlikely to have a chance to read this month. Maybe I can include shorter bits about each of them in the rest of this month’s posts on Deep Vellum’s titles . . .